1. Home
  2. Enterprise Backup Solutions
  3. CrashPlan Reviews
  4. User Review of CrashPlan
Plan on a Crash
March 11, 2016

Plan on a Crash

Graham Pocta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with CrashPlan

We use CrashPlan as a supplementary backup for our file servers and we also use it to back up mobile computers. It is being used across the entire organization. We also resell CrashPlan to our clients as an endpoint backup solution. It allows us to reduce complexity by no longer requiring that our documents sync with our files servers.
  • Simplicity. CrashPlan is dead simple to install and configure.
  • Reliability. I get an email report every morning of when the last backup for all of our managed devices was. It is rare that a device hasn't been backed up in the last 24 hours.
  • Cheap! The cost for CrashPlan is so low that I have never thought twice about the decision to purchase it.
  • CrashPlan has problems backing up over 1 million files or 1TB of data. It is possible, but there is a little bit of finagling that needs to be done.
  • CrashPlan still based on a Java backend, so memory usage is fairly high. I believe there are plans to remove Java from the picture, though.
  • At present, you are unable to purchase a shipped hard drive restore using the MSP hosted platform -- all restores have to happen over the internet. This is a problem when you're trying to restore multiple GB of data quickly. This is why I usually keep a local backup as well.
  • As a reseller, we make a modest margin with reselling CrashPlan. I don't really care how much we make or don't make, as I feel that it's our responsibility to help our customers protect their data. It definitely helps us do that very easily.
I switched to CrashPlan from Mozy roughly two years ago to get away from an arduous provisioning process and a per-GB pricing model. We were looking for something that was reliable and something that we could price consistently so that our customers wouldn't be surprised by a large bill just for having some extra data.
As a managed service provider, my clients have tended toward cloud-hosted platforms and the need for an onsite server has been reduced consistently over the past 8 years. Protecting data when you don't have a server is pretty difficult without some sort of service offering. I could see larger organizations being able to roll their own backup solution via VPN or offline folders, but even then, I think CrashPlan still fits in quite well in large enterprises for endpoint backup.