With CrashPlan, you can to choose multiple data storage locations, including local drives. That same 1 GB file uploaded in under five minutes. But, turning off data deduplication in the program’s advanced settings made a huge difference. The software took a full 20 minutes to upload a 1 GB file to the cloud on a 25 Mbps connection-about four times as long as we would have expected.

One of the areas in which CrashPlan falls most short is performance. So, if an entire hard drive goes down, restoring everything from the cloud requires some patience.

CrashPlan’s cloud interface doesn’t allow you to easily tag an entire directory for download in one click. When it comes to file recovery, restoring data can be somewhat cumbersome. On the other hand, it’s easy to forget to tag a folder for backup. On the one hand, it’s quick and simple to make sure you’re backing up all your files to a recovery drive or your cloud space. The software tags files by folder location rather than file type, which can be both good and bad. Surprisingly, CrashPlan doesn’t offer a mobile app.ĬrashPlan’s file restore interface. There’s also a web client that enables you to schedule backups. CrashPlan: Client and client setupĬrashPlan is available as a desktop platform for macOS, Windows, and Linux computers, or it can be installed on Linux servers. That means you can keep a catalog of file versions that extends for years rather than months. Importantly, the software doesn’t automatically remove deleted files from your cloud storage without permission. That’s extremely important when recovering from file corruptions or ransomware, since you may need to go back a few versions to find a clean copy of your damaged files. You’re able to keep old versions of files indefinitely, and you have a significant amount of control over how file versions are kept with CrashPlan. That means you can create one or more physical recovery hard drives as well as keep a catalog of files for recovery in the cloud.įile versioning, a feature usually associated with backup tools, is another strength for CrashPlan. But, you can also back up files to multiple storage locations at the same time.

(Image credit: CrashPlan)ĬrashPlan comes with its own unlimited cloud storage space, which serves as the default launch point for file recovery. You can customize your versioning settings to better recover after a ransomware attack.

Crashplan cloud backup