Help!! New backup method needed, CrashPlan policy change.

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paradoxgrowth
Getting the hang of things
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Joined: Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:09 pm

Help!! New backup method needed, CrashPlan policy change.

Post by paradoxgrowth »

Hello everyone

I am pretty upset and scared with CPs new policy change. They will no longer hold on to deleted files indefinitely. This means if something gets accidentally deleted, I only have 90 days to be aware of it and restore it. I don’t post to social media, I don’t want to loose my photos!

I have been researching a solution and I’m tired. I have been burned by so many local back up software (QNAP included). Online backups are too expensive and none keep deleted files for more than a few days or a year.

Can anyone share what they do? Is there something I’m missing??!!
Thisisnotmyname
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Joined: Mon Nov 19, 2018 1:21 am

Re: Help!! New backup method needed, CrashPlan policy change.

Post by Thisisnotmyname »

Crashplan throughout their history offered good deals to try and obtain market share while burning cash. Each time they've removed value from their plans they've been moving closer to the market reality because the original was unsustainable. Amazon S3 Glacier is cheap but slow if you have an event that requires restoration (if it's family photos that should be fine, you don't care if they're offline for weeks while you restore). Backblaze is a good plan at a good price. I'm sure others here could recommend their favorites for personal cloud storage too. If you don't trust QNAP software (I don't think anyone here would fault you for that opinion) then there are third party backup software out there too. Plenty of organizations with very valuable data rely on cloud based backups as part of their strategy, multiple copies with robustness in each makes the odds that you lose your family photos incredibly low. The old school rule was 3-2-1, three copies of your data on two different media (e.g. drive and tape, or drive and NAS) and one of them offsite. That's still a pretty good plan for the majority of people. If you don't trust yourself not to delete things then change the permissions on folders to read only after you've backed up. If you have a robust backup plan like this I think your anxiety about losing your data is undue.
paradoxgrowth
Getting the hang of things
Posts: 80
Joined: Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:09 pm

Re: Help!! New backup method needed, CrashPlan policy change.

Post by paradoxgrowth »

Thisisnotmyname wrote: Sat Sep 18, 2021 6:21 pm Crashplan throughout their history offered good deals to try and obtain market share while burning cash. Each time they've removed value from their plans they've been moving closer to the market reality because the original was unsustainable. Amazon S3 Glacier is cheap but slow if you have an event that requires restoration (if it's family photos that should be fine, you don't care if they're offline for weeks while you restore). Backblaze is a good plan at a good price. I'm sure others here could recommend their favorites for personal cloud storage too. If you don't trust QNAP software (I don't think anyone here would fault you for that opinion) then there are third party backup software out there too. Plenty of organizations with very valuable data rely on cloud based backups as part of their strategy, multiple copies with robustness in each makes the odds that you lose your family photos incredibly low. The old school rule was 3-2-1, three copies of your data on two different media (e.g. drive and tape, or drive and NAS) and one of them offsite. That's still a pretty good plan for the majority of people. If you don't trust yourself not to delete things then change the permissions on folders to read only after you've backed up. If you have a robust backup plan like this I think your anxiety about losing your data is undue.
Thisisnotmyname thanks so much for your help. I am still sort of freaking out about this so any guidance is definitely welcomed and comforting. Admittedly I have used their service to get really old documents back. I also have fear that I could loose an important photo like my engagement.

Amazon S3 Glacier seems like a good option to me, I only need documents (very small) quickly. Even then, I would be okay with simply having a local back up for something like that. The price seems a little strange to me. Do they charge to upload and download? Seems like they charge about 4 dollars a month per TB. Right now that seems more expensive than CP, given they charge 9 dollars and are backing about 4 TB.

I had another idea but I haven't quite thought through it. If they want me to keep a copy of EVERY F&*#ing file then maybe I can. I have been with them since 2014 and even with all my archiving (i.e. uploading then deleting), my entire back up with CP is only 10 TB. I have an open slot on my TS-677 which as far as I can tell will support a 16 TB HDD. What about downloading the entire backup to the new hard drive, then oneway syncing to it. Then nothing every gets deleted! Sound stupid? I am a little shy on sleep.

Thanks again!
Thisisnotmyname
Easy as a breeze
Posts: 447
Joined: Mon Nov 19, 2018 1:21 am

Re: Help!! New backup method needed, CrashPlan policy change.

Post by Thisisnotmyname »

I didn't necessarily follow everything you just said so I'll just state what I'd recommend...

I think the old 3-2-1 guidance I mentioned is still good for most home/personal users. The "2" and the "1" in this approach naturally give you the "3". The three copies would be: the originals on the primary device (e.g. computer/laptop/phone, whatever source device originated the files), external local storage (I like NAS for this purpose given that you can typically have internal redundancy in their hardware but for most users an external USB hard drive is probably enough), and cloud storage (if it's just important files and a limited number of pictures and video a lot of the consumer focused services like dropbox, icloud, one drive, etc... can accomplish that for free or nearly free or for bigger volumes of data or more complex requirements like versioning etc... you have the big cloud storage providers like Amazon).

First device (computer/phone/laptop/etc...) is automatic. Just don't delete content from them. If you are running out of local space (i.e. you have a ultra compact laptop with 128GB hard drive and lots of pictures and videos) then you can no longer count that device as one of your "3" and you should get another local backup device. Given your concern about accidental deletion you could have a process whereby after you create important files (i.e. import your latest images) you make those folders and contents read only. Some file systems even allow WORM (write one, read many) so the contents are automatically read only, I don't know of a way to do that with APFS (MacOS) and I'm not a Windows person so can't comment there but Linux via ZFS (as one example) can. Finally, you'll want to make sure you have some automated process that is backing up your primary device to the secondary (and/or cloud) service(s). Time Machine on MacOS can do this and there are many third party products that do so as well.

Second device (NAS or external drive) - make sure the backup software you use is targeting here so it stays in sync. There will always be some amount of lag, typically you'll have hourly or daily backups so in the event you lose data on the primary device you could be out of luck for your most recent files or changes. I like RAID of some flavor on external backup devices for redundancy. Don't count on that alone to keep you from data loss, that makes the device itself less subject to complete failure but you could still have a failure that results in losing the entire array or you could have an event such as a fire (or ransom-ware) that destroys the full device. Which brings us to three...

Off-site - QNAP has its own software to push data to various cloud providers (Hybrid Backup Station/HBS) and many here seem to use it and like it. I don't use it personally. There are plenty of third party options as well (I use one). Most of those packages allow for differential backups (time based snapshots) rather than just syncing the folder contents and can be configured to ignore deletion. For example I have a series of backups in the cloud and each only contains changes/additions from the previous so if I need a prior version of something (or something I subsequently removed) I can pull it from a prior backup set. This can obviously take up more space over time if you are making a lot of changes to files or churn in adding and deleting a lot of files. Backup software generally lets you set rules about quotas for data or retention policies etc... though too. Finally, most of those packages can be set to periodically validate the backups (comparing checksums or binary between local and remote data) to make sure that your backups are complete and correct.

Provided you correctly configure a solution like that there's not much to worry about. If you are super concerned about accidental deletion though you could invest in a solution with WORM, there are still ways those can fail but accidental deletion would no longer be one of them. Those systems are used for compliance systems in the corporate world and work very well.
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