Backup software that tells you it’s backing up your stuff when it isn’t SUCKS.
Seems CrashPlan still hasn’t fixed the wonderful feature I ran into a couple years ago where you hit a magic limit and your backups stop working…. while their software continues to send you weekly emails telling you that your stuff is all backed up.
It makes perfect sense that they need to use resources (RAM) to keep track of whether or not a file that’s being tracked has changed. If you have a large number of files, that can mean a LARGE amount of resources.
Their software has a default limit on the amount of RAM it will use to track changed files. No problem with that.
When their software hits that limit, and cannot allocate the memory it needs, it crashes, writes a restart.yyyy-mm-dd_hh.mm.ss.log file in the folder where the binary is installed. Then it restarts… without telling you it’s crashed. I DO have a problem with that.
In fact, this morning, when I needed to restore something, I discovered that I have a problem with another machine that hit that limit a few months ago. No, the most recent version of CrashPlan does NOT detect that this has happened. I’d complain and ask that they do this again, but they obviously don’t care enough about the issue to have done anything about it.
Other than that problem I like using CrashPlan, so I’ve written some scripts that run weekly that let me know if this has happened. I suggested that they needed to do this, but, at least in the most recent version I’m aware of, they have not done anything to address the problem.