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I’m pretty good with making sure I have backups, I have several external drives I use regularly. When I’ve gone away on holiday I usually get a friend to look after some of the external drives. I don’t just want to protect against hard disk break downs, I also want to make sure I can restore all my thousands of photos if the house burns down. But keeping a semi-recent off-site backup copy is not so easy, so when I discovered Crashplan recently, I thought I had found the solution. I would still have local backups, but a second line of defense would be Crashplan. Crashplan offer the first month free of charge, so I started it backing up my photos (40 GB). I also sold my family on the idea of a family subscription as the prices are pretty decent. Well, we shall see if this is indeed woth pursuing. Today the crashplan GUI showed me that the backup has stopped with another 2 days to go. The log file shows odd error messages such as “CrashPlan Central not ready for backup. Reason: The backup location is being moved” and “CrashPlan Central not ready for backup. Reason: The backup location is not accessible”. Searching the internet showed that some users had similar error messages back in February and apparently crashplan wasn’t terribly proactive. What may be even more scary is that their main website page is now also unavailable. This is a time when a company needs to use its Twitter or Facebook account to tell its customers what is going on, but so far nothing. Crashplans promise to “Get your files securely – anytime, anywhere” would not be of great comfort right now if now was the time I wanted to perform a restore. I’ll look and see though, everyone can have IT challenges. What is important is a combination of speed with which the issues are resolved, and how well you communicate when you have challenges…
Update: Almost 14 hours after the backup stopped, it has recommenced… Others have reported via twitter that the main website pages was unavailable. Crashplan staff have tweeted back replies such as: “We didn’t seem to have any recent issues”, “We did not report any errors overnight” and “No reported issues overnight”. What is worse, Crashplan not telling the truth or plain not knowing that their website was unavailable? I will probably still subscribe to their service once my 1 month trial period expires. I will not be paying Rolls-Royce prices so I don’t expect Rolls-Royce service.
