Why I've been loyal to CrashPlan for many years - and more to come
March 02, 2017
Why I've been loyal to CrashPlan for many years - and more to come
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with CrashPlan
CrashPlan is used across the whole organization. Every employee has it installed on their laptop and we also have it installed on some some servers to back up their data files. Most employees are remote and CrashPlan allows us to back up everyone without having to host our own backup server.
- Crashplan backs up everything with ease. By default it starts backing up your user profile without even having to configure it, and thats enough for many people to get up and running right away, but it is highly configurable if you want.
- Restoring files is pretty effortless as well. Easy to browse to the file(s) you want, choose a point in time if you want, and restore. Viola!
- Versioning is a great automatic feature as well. Many of my users have taken advantage of restoring a previous version of a file they've mistakenly overwritten.
- Being able to backup to multiple destinations is great too. You can connect your own storage, choose it as a destination and it starts using it. The local destination backup option makes restoration of large data much quicker.
- Their version 5 client is almost too hands off. While one can appreciate the simplicity and cleanness of its design, I often prefer to get under the hood right away.
- I wish they would make it easier to open the client from the system tray in version 5. In previous versions you would just double click the icon. Now it takes 3 clicks to expand the tray icon, open the settings and choose to open the actual application.
- Sometimes destinations are offline when you need to restore, and usually at the worst time. We use CrashPlan to restore data for laptop replacements, and there are times when the destination is offline and you have to wait a while for the restore option to be available.
- Our company has a mostly mobile workforce. We had struggled with a way to have everyone's files backed up. A local backup solution wasn't going to cut it, especially for those that never use VPN, and would be a huge administrative burden. Adding a cloud backup solution, with unlimited storage space for every user was a perfect choice.
- A per a user backup solution it has also aided the helpdesk team with the replacement of computers. It saves a ton of time to be able to image a new computer, start a CrashPlan restore and just give the computer to the user, knowing all their files will be there.
- We've taken advantage of CrashPlan to recover from a ransomware attack, with zero loss of files. We would have at least lost the affected users' files without a local backup, and restoration of the network share files would have taken a great amount of time if we had to do it via tape.
We compared CrashPlan with other choices and they were either too expensive or didn't have the backup capacity we required at the time. For lack of a better solution, we were very close to signing with Mozy, and this was years ago when CrashPlan was still a new player in the market. I found them at the eleventh hour and started the product comparison. Mozy couldn't offer us unlimited storage space and when we found that CrashPlan could, it was almost a no-brainer. Carbonite was a close contender as well, but if I recall correctly, they didn't offer enterprise level pricing that we were looking for (note, this was years ago and their current offerings may be different).
Evaluating CrashPlan and Competitors
Yes - Replaced a local tape backup solution from EMC Retrospect. A tape backup solution was no longer a viable solution, due to growing data sets and an increasing remote workforce. A cloud solution was needed.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
While many factors combined led to us signing with Code42, back then we were a smaller business and getting new purchases approved often came down to price. I had to break down the need for a solution, the features it provided and how we would implement it. We were lucky that CrashPlan offered us everything we needed at a price point we could afford.
Six years later the industry has changed, other competitors have stepped up their game and new solutions are on the market. We would have more to consider when comparing solutions and would rely on not only our own testing but third party assessments and reviews. From time to time we still check what is available to ensure we are still using the right solution and CrashPlan continues to receive high praise for both corporate and consumer offerings.