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CrashPlan Australia been down for 5 days and counting

49 points by stevenringo ↗ HN
CrashPlan woes continue.

I have not been able to back up to CrashPlan in Sydney for nearly 5 days.

Even worse - YOU CANNOT RESTORE! When logging in to their site, you get the message "Unable to login to server".

How can a backup service leave their customers in the lurch for so long?

Suggest to all that have been screwed by their recent decision to kill their Home product, get the hell out of there as soon as you can.

The best I could get out of support was:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Code42 Support!

Unfortunately, it appears there has been a problem with the server you mentioned (ECA-SYD) going down. Your files are still perfectly safe, but it's taking us a lot longer than usual to get the server back up and running. I do not have an ETA for a fix just yet, but I will let you know once I have more information.

You're certainly not the first person I've talked to who's having issues with this server, and I'm doing everything I can to bring more attention to the problem.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns, and I'll be more than happy to help!

Thanks, Redacted Code42 Support

13 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 30.2 ms ] thread
trengrj
When you ask about backups for an entire region (Sydney) and then they refer to "this" server as in singular, you know things are bad, at the least not HA, at the worst not even backed up.
thiagocsf
I don't understand why a backup service would need to setup regional infrastructure. It's not sensitive to latency, the bandwidth costs the same and it adds management overhead.
crivabene
Not sure about Australia, but the most common reason would be local regulations (i.e. laws forbidding to store certain data outside of the borders of a particular region). But given we're talking about Australia, I would not rule out the latency at all.
Andrenid
In Australia it might be to attract Gov clients? Not sure why the Home service would matter though other than Australians are big on using services located in Australia.
SyneRyder
Sorry, not seeing that here. I've been able to backup to CrashPlan Australia over the last few days, last fully completed backup on August 31 and I can see some files that I created this morning on September 2. I'm able to restore files as well.

Mine is hosted on ACA-SYD, so I'm not sure if ECA-SYD was a typo or if you're on a different server.

stevenringo
Not a typo. Are you using Home or Small business?
SyneRyder
Using CrashPlan Home - I haven't decided if I'm upgrading to Small Biz or jumping ship yet. I just got home and my CrashPlan has started syncing again to ACA-SYD over WiFi, albeit at 208kbps.

I did have outages about a year ago, where I had to repeatedly enter my restore password to kickstart the backup. But I haven't had that issue recently.

stevenringo
Interesting that you know the server name. I looked through the logs to attempt to find out the cause. I don't think that information surfaces anywhere in the UI.
SyneRyder
I had to dig for it, prompted by seeing your post. If you click on "Show Code42 CrashPlan" to bring up the main window, then click on Destinations, Cloud, and then actually click on "CrashPlan Australia". It should show some extra info including the internet address, which I assume is my server name.
jtagx
What's actually going on with CrashPlan? Why are they shutting down their Home offering?
zhte415
One really really simple thing they could have done in that communication is (using their casual style):

> I will reply again in 2 hours (or XX time) outlining action taken and what we're currently doing to restore services.

And actually reply spontaneously.

> Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns, and I'll be more than happy to help!

Very canned.

ranu
ECA-SYD is still down - 9 days since it first stopped working! I've had a response from Crashplan support confirming this, but still no ETA on a fix. Pretty unacceptable for a backup service, but I have a few TB of data that will be a pain to move elsewhere.