CrashPlan Saves My Sanity
February 04, 2016
CrashPlan Saves My Sanity
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with CrashPlan
CrashPlan is in use as an emergency desktop backup tool for our top level executive administrative assistants. In the event of an infection or hardware failure, CrashPlan restores productivity to this target group faster than any other single tool we have available. It is used across the organization, in every division office, remote and corporate.
- Ease of install - You install it, and hope you never have to use it! With just a little bit of front-loading time, your users are able to sign in and kick off their first backup in minutes.
- Ease of administration - It packages neatly within a deployment tool, or can be installed ad hoc from the dashboard all by itself.
- Cross-OS use - With the install packages already available for Linux, Windows (both x64 and x86), and Mac OSX we have yet to run into a desktop flavor that we can't back up.
- Productivity/Speed of restore - It used to take our help desk a week or more to restore all of the applications and tools to a particular user after we replaced their hardware. With CrashPlan, we image the machine and dump the old files on it. Our top admins are back in business in minutes if we have an imaged machine ready to go.
- Cloud destination stability - I get a lot of alerts telling me that our cloud destination was unreachable. It happens about twice a day. The connection restores itself, but it continues to happen even after a health check with the Code42 support team.
- Communication between the dashboard and the admin accounts - We've had issues with emails dropping from the dashboard to our administrators for the tool.
- Firewall - Make sure the correct ports are open on your firewall for remote users.
- Productivity - When it comes to restoring our users and getting back up and running, this tool is unparalleled.
- Desktop migration - migration from a legacy workstation on to a new one is immediately easy and less painful.
- It can be hard to illustrate a clear ROI if none of our users have a hardware malfunction or malware due to our other network protections. Without a hard crash, sometimes leadership assumes that their invisible tool isn't as useful as it truly can be.
We have Symantec (Veritas) NetBackup for our file servers and other server backups. That tool is cumbersome and complicated, and restoring a file is time consuming for backup administrators and hurts the continued productivity of the users who need their data restored. With CrashPlan, we no longer have to worry about the integrity of server backups, or reach back to an offsite tape to restore. We can even teach users to restore their own data in real time, which we never had the ability to do before.