CrashPlan ticks a lot of the boxes but support lets it down.
July 03, 2022

CrashPlan ticks a lot of the boxes but support lets it down.

David Jones | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Code42 CrashPlan

I use CrashPlan as a budget point solution for small businesses and SOHO clients. This is predominantly to provide backup of critical data for individuals, families, or small businesses. It is not to provide system recovery backup but specifically focuses on the critical/important data an individual, family or small business would want to have backed up, off-site. Invariably it is used as the off-site component of a classic 3-2-1 backup plan.
  • Product is pretty easy to configure (Less than 30 minutes for a single computer)
  • Product generally grinds away without any noticeable issues
  • Regional cloud storage locations are fairly unique for this kind of product at this price point
  • Technical support
  • Support ticketing and lifecycle
  • Phone support hours
  • I think you should have an idea where the beef is by now
  • Price
  • General reliability. Although woe is me if/when things to go wrong and I need to get support.
  • Regional/local data storage options
  • A positive is that it has allowed me to implement a very cost-effective cloud backup point solution for multiple clients
  • A negative is, in case you haven't got it yet... Support is consistently sub-par
CrashPlan (in my specific case the CrashPlan Pro or CrashPlan for Small Business (there seems to be somewhat of an ongoing identity crisis with the products) is significantly lower overhead, in terms of cost and complexity, when compared to the other two products I have evaluated/used. The downsides are that it is also significantly less functional than the other products. CrashPlan is, as I have said a good value simple point solution.

Do you think CrashPlan delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with CrashPlan's feature set?

Yes

Did CrashPlan live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of CrashPlan go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy CrashPlan again?

Yes

Individuals (SOHO), families and SMBs, who have a tight budget for offsite critical company data backup are well suited to this product. Especially if you want your data to be hosted locally (Australia in our case). Larger companies, with higher requirements and budgets would be better served elsewhere. Especially when you consider the poor technical support. Although, to be fair, their poor support may just be issues with their Pro/SMB products, as opposed to their enterprise products. However, if that is the case it's a pretty poor show/indicator still.

Code42 CrashPlan Support

CrashPlan is essentially a set and forget backup tool that appears to do the job it is intended to. However, if you encounter any issues or have any reason to contact their support expect things to not go particularly well. Their support documentation, whilst plentiful, is often filled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, especially when trying to work out which documents refer to which products. Should you need to actually contact support then things only get worse. Responses can be somewhat terse, when they eventually happen, sometimes getting absolutely nothing for days, in Web tickets and often with back and forth streams of questions, over days.Just looking at their KB article about their "Support policy" immediate should ring alarm bells: (https://support.code42.com/Terms_and_conditions/Code42_customer_support_resources/CrashPlan_for_Smal.....Immediate issues identifiable here are:
1. For a company that offers a global service, to operate strictly on a US CDT office hours for phone support is positively archaic, in a world that has been globalised, with global companies offering "follow-the-sun" support services for decades already, is pretty woeful.
2. Web support requirements details a long list of technical information for us to provide in the case, that the systems already employed by CrashPlan should be able to provide to the case technicians automatically. Almost every bullet point in the list is a piece of information they will already have. All they don't have is the will to use the data already at their disposal.
3. "How we handle support requests" details the severity levels their case management operates around. However, their ticketing system not only doesn't allow us to set a case severity level, when opening or editing a ticket, but doesn't even include what the current severity level is on the ticket!4. Judging by their approach to support call hours (see point 1, above) and the way in which the web support ticket lifecycles go, I would be more than surprised if they offered any kind of remote support assistance, via one of the plethora of remote support tools, such as Webex or LogMeIn, like most other service providers do, these days. However, I do accept, this is a speculative comment.
ProsCons
Knowledgeable team
Slow Resolution
Poor followup
Not kept informed
Escalation required
Difficult to get immediate help
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
Slow Initial Response
This is not an option, as far as I know.
Yes - No. I was given a confirmation that it is a known bug and that they had no officially published article about it.
The technicians in support appear to be very knowledgeable about the product. It's just a shame their overall approach to supporting their Pro/SMB versions of the product appears to be so poor.