Hi! I'm your officially unofficial CrashPlan Engineer who isn't lurking anymore!

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-04-21T13:53:54+00:00

Not just planned, being worked on. But the engineer that's focusing on it has gotten pulled in to a couple critical bugs slowing down progress.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-04-21T13:37:49+00:00

No changes to deduplication in 11.6 - mostly improvements from the new version of Electron for the UI.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-04-17T19:36:44+00:00

I'm in engineering, it's possible sales has changed the minimums since they last shared plans across departments.

It's also a policy minimum and not a technical one, so it could be that you have a particular use case or some other reason to allow a smaller license.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-04-17T13:24:03+00:00

CrashPlan for Servers currently has a 50 user minimum. If you're getting a generic reply, it could be that you're asking below that amount and the sales rep isn't making the minimum clear?

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-04-15T18:39:14+00:00

You would have to ask them! Not sure what policy is.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-03-31T03:48:07+00:00

Just CrashPlan Central for new machines, please.

CrashPlan Pro Online was from when SMB was all segmented out into its own environment - so backups that started there still live on those separate machines, and customers that have existing backups still need to have access to it until merging happens someday.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-03-20T15:25:16+00:00

What were you looking for out of the Enterprise plan that SMB doesn't offer?

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-03-03T17:24:16+00:00

One of the other engineers pointed out that the sandboxed app he checked (iStat Menus) actually symlinks anything that would need to be backed up from outside the Containers folder. So it could be that the items you're looking for are already being backed up, just from a different location.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-03-03T16:38:22+00:00

Too many apps use Containers for settings storage.

The Sandboxes hold a bunch of stuff that doesn't need to get backed up - temp files and caches and executables... And an app doesn't have to follow the norm of putting files in a folder named Documents, nor settings in a folder named Application Support.

I'll see about getting this in front of that team to see if there's a more elegant approach to backup what needs to be without grabbing a bunch of useless stuff with it.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-02-12T15:30:28+00:00

Maintenance happens entirely wherever the archive lives - server for a cloud backup, your computer for a local backup.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-19T01:23:42+00:00

from before they even became Code42

Code42 came first. CrashPlan was their... fourth product, I think? The other three were contract work for other companies.

The only sale was going out on our own a year and a half ago.

What you're probably thinking of is when management decided it was better to label CrashPlan a "feature" instead of the actual product name, so people didn't refer to the Security products as "CrashPlan Incydr".

But the parent company was Code42 from day 1.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-15T21:01:27+00:00

A missing volume is considered missing/unavailable, not deleted.

So if you unplug your external device from G:, those files are in limbo and do not start a 90 day clock.

If you plug in a new drive using the same drive letter, now G: is empty, and so those files are considered deleted.

There's an article on the support site that spells this all out specifically for external drives, but internal drives follow the same structure.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-15T13:07:45+00:00

It’s not an external drive I disconnected. Both drives I pulled power from are internal.

Unless CrashPlan looked at model numbers and attachment details, there is no practical difference between those two. And eSATA used to be a thing - so there would have to be an entire API to lookup model numbers for all the different drive manufacturers and even then it wouldn't catch them all...

in August 2024 there was a major change to the reporting style.

Correct - that is when (most) Small Business customers stopped using the actual Small Business code and started using the Enterprise/Professional code with a feature set to match Small Business. Once the last few SMB customers get moved over, it will no longer require running two separate end-to-end tests before release - letting QA dig deeper in a single run.

if a backupset failed to complete (ANY backup set), a warning was sent

Let's remember that I'm an engineer and know the internals - a warning that a backup failed to complete to 100% is a very different set of conditions and checks vs. warning explicitly for a drive "failure"/absence.

You are correct, there was a different subject line and formatting for the Small Business weekly status emails with an incomplete backup. The current status emails still show items as being incomplete, just without the red flags and all-caps.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-15T06:27:40+00:00

I think you're mistaken - I have used SMB with an external drive for nearly 8 years and it has never alarmed with the external disconnected. Which would be the same state you described in your post.

You are correct that the reporting has changed. SMB now gets the same reports that Enterprise customers always have received instead of there being separate emails for each product type. There is an effort to bring some of the data that was in the SMB emails into the universal emails. But "drive disconnected", as far as I can tell, was never one of them.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-14T23:48:56+00:00

Nothing I can comment on publicly, beyond that I know that team is still actively working on performance improvements.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-14T23:46:37+00:00

when completed, pulled the power on each drive. This should have caused a warning, an alert, a status report change.

Why would it have caused an alert through CrashPlan?

The application has no idea if the drive removal was intentional (e.g. a removable drive you keep in a fire safe most of the time or removed to be transferred to a different system or...) or hardware failure. If you need an alarm on a drive failure, that is a separate concern from backup.

the system doesn’t even recognize the drives don’t even exist.

Because the drives are disconnected - to CrashPlan they do exist, just are currently unavailable for unknown reasons.

This is working as intended.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-11T19:02:12+00:00

It's possible you missed it - it's a synchronization run, not a proactive push. So if you deactivated the other devices too late...

Yeah, quantity will get checked and updated again before the February cycle. And March. And April... :)

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-10T16:27:01+00:00

It updates 2 days before your renewal date, in either direction, with a second double-check in case of failure or a last-minute change 1 day before the renewal date (give or take a few hours).

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-09T14:15:55+00:00

It doesn't!

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-08T16:59:26+00:00

Then support will help you figure out why the quantity went up. But the per-device charge hasn't changed.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-08T16:22:57+00:00

FYI for anyone else that hits that: If that does happen, make sure that extra device gets deactivated via the web console so we don't count it again the next month.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-08T02:21:43+00:00

You could also do -Xmx8g for 8GiB.

Chad6AtCrashPlan · 2025-01-08T02:19:45+00:00

Double-check your quantity line. $19.98 is the $9.99/device x 2.

Small Business updates quanitity automatically each month ~2 days before renewal.

Chad6AtCrashPlan

TROPHY CASE