Code 42 Software

If you want to back up your data, don’t use CrashPlan. If you ever think you might need to use their support, don’t use CrashPlan. If your data is 0.001% important to you, don’t use CrashPlan. However, if you like wasting money and do not care about ever restoring data and/​or love working with people who are ill equipped to handle any actual issue — CrashPlan might be your nirvana!
We needed a backup solution for our small company data and CrashPlan was one we evaluated. It’s client was easy to install, slow to backup. It took a week to get 1TB backed up to their servers. (We have a one gigabit internet connection) Once it was backed up, a few test restores showed us that it was viable. When I went in to pay for the service, I was contacted and told since we are a business, I needed a PRO account. Cool — created a pro account as directed.
What I was not told is that our backup was deleted. Cool– another week to seed. Frustrating, but went ahead and did it.
Two weeks ago, we started receiving emails that our account would be cancelled. What? It was a paid account — checked the biz AmEx and verified we were paying them. Yes — we sure were. I replied to the email as directed and asked them what was up.
Customer service agent «Frosty» (yes, that is the name of the agent. Inspires a lot of confidence, right?) replied that they «helped» me by cancelling my account. I was directed to just sign up again and seed data. Again. Another week — right? Of course, I would lose all the versions of the data I had backed up already — but that was my problem not CrashPlans.
I emailed back and told him to reactivate my account, never cancel my account again without my permission, and do this asap before my data was lost. Silence.
I email again. Silence.
Today I email and tell Frosty that I will be calling in. Frosty the techmonster emailed back while I was on web support with Tremaine W. with unhelpful advice. Now, I would love to report that Tremaine was able to quickly resolve my issue. Unfortunately, no. Tremaine appears to have attended the same support school as Frosty and instructed me to create a new account. Third time the charm, right? Sigh.
I refused to give in, and after 45 minutes Tremaine discovered the magical ability to solve my issue without me needed to create another account. Of course, it took me holding firm — I would bet most people would just give up. Heck, not sure why I didn’t.
So far (20 minutes after «hanging up» with Tremaine) it does appear like I will not have to re-​seed my data but if I do — I am done with this company. I will go back and evaluate other options as CrashPlan seems to be disinterested in actually helping anyone.
Look — Data is important. That is why you are backing it up. CrashPlan doesn’t appear to care about your data or helping you in the event you need assistance. If you get Frosty or Tremaine, you better believe you will regret going with CrashPlan. Seek an alternative.

Wow. Glad I checked my data and lack of backup. I had renewed my subscription a few days late and was told there was no issue. Find all my data was erased after a few days with no notice. Tried to reinstall and for two days and after three trouble tickets, the new subscription is correct and will not let me delete and reinstall. Possible class action law suit since suspect I am not the only one with these issues and the value of what has been destroyed with no acceptable fix unacceptable.

Skip Crashplan. They will NOT protect your data. They just totally destroyed, without prior warning, three years worth of data from a five year long research project. Lost. All of it. Sent me a notice AFTER it happened. Their data retention policy believes that a backup is not an archive. Your data is NOT safe here. They deliberately deleted my data and THEN sent me an email. They seemed to be quite proud of this.
Half a decade of my professional life just went up in smoke because of these jerks. If you can tolerate that, by all means shoot them your money.

I’ve been trying to get through to the billing department for a week. I keep getting the run around and told that someone will contact me and that they keep putting my «ticket» through as a «high priority».I recommend people really do the research prior to using this service! The customer service and billing department is horrible. I was told someone would call me three different times and now was told they won’t be calling, it will be an email. I am beyond frustrated with this company! Why is it that a person has to go out of their way to leave negative reviews and spend hours sending emails and making telephone calls until the matter is resolved. It shouldn’t have to come to that!

Time for an update. Had a hard drive fail on my server last week that had 1.5TB of video on it (mostly home movies and DVDs copied for easier playing). I did everything I could to recover the data but the drive was dead. Ordered a new one with confidence that I’d backed everything up.
Everything was indeed backed up. However… when the drive was failing, CrashPlan apparently stopped being able to read certain directories. Rather than freeze the backup, it started marking those directories as deleted in the backup. Thankfully, when restoring, you have the option to view deleted folders and files so I could select them and still get them. However, retention for deleted folders was only 30 days, so had I not caught this I might have lost some home movies forever.
Second issue: restore speed. I expected a long restore for 1.5TB, but I’ve got a 40mbps internet connection so I figured a week or so. It’s been going for 3 days and has restored about 5%. Estimated time to completion is showing as a year or more with average download speed of 300−500kbps. It’s seriously not even workable. I contacted them to see if there was any way to get a bigger pipe for a bit or even order a hard drive with the data and they responded that they don’t offer that and it is what it is.
It should be noted I’ve been recommending CrashPlan to friends and customers for years. I love the interface, the control, and the stability of the backup. But the restore is abysmal. I’ll be looking for another provider once this restore completes… if it ever does.

This company is terrible; I have canceled service months ago and still they persist withe service reports. Get out of my computer.

Terrible company. Needing help on Nov 13^th, I got a message back saying they were busy. On Nov 23^rd (still no help), I got another message saying they are still busy. I am with them only because I bought a long-​term contract. Two years ago, I had a major comport crash. After three weeks of incompetent technical help I had to buy a new computer to get myself out of the mess they created. I do not know how they stay in business. They are the worst. Maybe they have some big corporate accounts that they take care of. Certainly, not the individual.

I have left multiple Voice Messages, emails and even Twitter messages with only a reply from Twitter saying «Code42 @code42 Sep 22
@SoundNVibe Sorry, our Customer Champions are very busy ATM. If you have general questions, I can attempt to answer them here.»
«Customer Champions» is a joke. I received this message September 22^nd after trying to contact them multiple times. Since then, I have followed up several times and even messaged their Twitter account again, with absolutely no reply.
If Code 42 can’t return a simple call, email or social network message, when I’m trying to give them my money, I wouldn’t trust them with anything.

First, do not believe that they will respond within 1 – 2 days to your request for help. I purchased this on 7÷13÷15 and could not get the install to complete. I contacted support immediately for help. After three or four days, I emailed again and got an email response that helped me create a password, but kept me stuck on the same screen asking if I wanted to modify or repair or do something else, and I couldn’t get out of it. I did not find the installation process easy. I contacted support again, and finally someone responded (on the support page where you enter your requests) that they had been short-​staffed and overloaded w/​requests that week. He gave me information that enabled me to get CrashPlan working and backing up. About three days later I got a warning email from them saying they hadn’t been able to back up my files for three days. WHY did this email come after three days? When I opened CrashPlan, it said it was backing up and the next backup was in 10 minutes. What’s with the email? I contacted them by phone immediately and they said someone would call me back. Two days later, no reply. I sent a very frustrated email through their support system. Generic reply through the support system. I called them and was told my call would be noted as priority and I would hear back late morning. No response for two more days. Then I got a very nice call from a technician offering to help me. I wasn’t home, it’s the weekend, I have no idea if anything is being backed up, and I’m sick of CrashPlan. I cancelled the subscription.

When I’m at home, I get speed tests of 75mbps download and 55mbps upload. At work, the WAN is Gigabit broadband with speed tests averaging 850mbps and 480mbps upload.
Based on so many 1-​star reviews on Code42’s website, customers have complained about throttling for years. It’s obvious Code42 throttles upload and download speeds to its home customers. Code42’s CrashPlan is inexpensive compare to other backup services, but the company throttles my home upload stream to just under 600kbps – yes that’s correct… barely 700 KILOBYTES per second. Sometimes, I see a speed burst of 2.5mbps for a few minutes, but the average upload speed rarely gets up to a megabyte per second unless I take my laptop into work and use my company’s WAN. Throttling still shows up, as the average upload speed fluctuates between 4.5 and 9mbps. Again, that’s using my work Gigabit WAN and not my home broadband.
Code42 doesn’t seem to want to grant faster access speeds for their home customers nor embrace a better Firewall architecture. They have business server backup software & pricing, but I’m not spending hundreds of dollars per month in the hope of less throttling.

I have never found customer service as helpful and responsive as I have with this company. Not only is their product exactly what I wanted but the support is really exceptional. My back-​ups were working fine initially but they became problematic. With the help of some really great support guys we narrowed it down to my computer not allocating enough memory to the program. They guided me through the inner workings of my MAC that I had never imagined existed and fixed the problem. This is a really great company with a really amazing team. I have highly recommended them to all my friends.

After being with the crash plan service for two months, and dealing with their support I wanted to write a review.
My large (800 GB) backup suddenly claimed to be gone so I contacted Code42’s support. They were super nice and informative, and it turned out everything was fine with my backup, but the cache on my computer had gotten corrupt. After clearing the cache with their very detailed instructions (and well written help pages) everything was good again.
I have used the restore features as well and was impressed that everything was so simple and easy. I think the price is very good for what they are providing. There don’t seem to be any problems with billing.
The only negatives (which cost them a star) would be the size of the background process, and the upload bandwidth to their service. They said they are working on a native (non-​java based) client which will decrease the memory footprint on your computer, so that takes care of the first issue. The upload bandwidth is often very wimpy (1 Mbps) even when I have awesome network power on my end. I don’t think this is intentional throttling because some times it really hauls and other times it trickles. I think it is just the nature of their business that their servers are busier some times than other ones.
For the price I am willing to tolerate the bandwidth issues and I still feel like I’m getting a great deal. Hopefully they will increase their network capacity over time.
At any rate, go sign up for their service and worry much less about your backups.

Overall, one has to seriously consider the value of this service. On one hand, unlimited storage, low cost, and good software offers an excellent value. However, the major issue with CrashPlan is poor backup and recovery performance. Uploads are throttled (reduced) ranging from 330−550KB/s. My actual upload speed is 3.0+ MB/​s. What’s the point of unlimited storage if it takes a week to backup 100GB, 30 days for 1TB, or 90 days for 3TB. Recovery download speed is also throttled to 1.25MB/s so plan accordingly. For example, recovery time is 1 day for 100GB, 10 days for 1TB, and 30 days for 3TB. FYI, this is not a configuration issue. I worked extensively with support on two occasions regarding poor performance and received the following response:
…These are pretty good to above average speeds for our users. It’s not uncommon at all for people on fibre to be receiving these sort of speeds… We try to provide an affordable backup service, and we allocate our bandwidth as evenly as we can amongst all our users. Depending on server and network load, the speeds will fluctuate. This changes, often depending on the time of day or if any upgrades are made to our servers. It’s hard to say for sure what speed you should be getting, but according to the logs, you’re getting a pretty decent connection…
If speeds were unthrottled (up to the speed of your own network connection), I would give this service 5 stars. But given such low speeds, 2 stars at best.

Be careful about their business practices. I can only say that the software is ‘okay’ since its been running on my machine for three years. Tough to really comment on the crashplan product, since its been auto backing up and when I did try to find old files, with some effort I did.
As for the business, watch out. I signed up for a three year subscription in 2010. I just looked in my bank account and was billed at a 220% rate increase. There was no communication reminding me of an upcoming ‘auto renew’ and no notification that the rate increased 220%!! From $ 180 to $ 400.
I know lots of companies out there do an auto-​renew, but all that I have dealt with have sent a reminder email ahead of time with the pricing. I called them to share my frustration and all someone said was «when you signed up there was a checkbox»

* Imaging geek alert *
Image 1: Your computer starts acting «funny» and you realize something has gone drastically wrong. You lose everything. Your e-​mail, your music, and heaven forbid — your food photos that you haven’t put onto Unilocal yet.
Image 2: Your apartment floods, and you walk in to see your computer sitting in a pool of water. Your heart sinks. Those food photos are gone again!
Image 3: You walk along your shag carpet with your best polyester pants and touch your computer to feel a static shock. Your heart sinks. Poor Unilocalers will never see your food photos again!
Image 4: After any of the previous you kick yourself for not regularly practicing a backup routine — it was such a pain after all, and it would never happen to you, right?
Alternate Image 4: You install Crashplan, set it up, and never think about it again until Image 1 – 3 or anything similar.
I’m a (closeted sometimes) geek. Everyone tells you the merits of backing up, and for years I’ve had my manual routine to do it whenever I remembered to. The automated solutions never seemed to work correctly, or didn’t have the right security features, etc.
Crashplan is constantly running on your machine and keeping an eye on what changes. It then quickly encrypts it (on your machine so you don’t expose yourself at all) and backs it up to one or all of your choice of locations:
— Local external drive or USB stick (free)
— To your friend’s computer (free)
— Crashplan’s remote servers (for a fee)
Yes, for free you can actually build up a small group of folks that regularly back up to each other for an entirely free solution and have encrypted copies of your stuff spread around to various people’s machines so you can get back something when you need it. Or simply do it between a laptop and a desktop and a work machine, etc. Works great to backup aging parents’ machines as well for free should they «I don’t know what I did but it doesn’t work» at any moment.
Or if you want to pay a little bit you can add in the crashplan servers as a «friend» that you pay for.
I’ve been using the service for a while now and have nothing but positive things to say about it. It has helped me out by getting back versions of files that I accidentally changed in sleepy moments, and I’ve test recovered larger chunks to make sure it was regularly working in case of a major image issue.
While crashplan doesn’t create a disk image per se, it does backup all of the files you would like to have backed up so that you can get back any version for as long as you like.
If you currently don’t have an automated backup system in place, you really should. Crashplan is a wonderful option to do it. It is good for your (disk) image!

I wish I could give negative stars!!! I was using CrashPlan as I have always heard that an offsite backup was a good idea. BAD PLAN!!! They have lost my data, cannot find it, and I have been without the data for 2 weeks already. I will have to recreate a TON of work, and will have lost a bunch as well because I relied on these morons to actually do their jobs and SAVE my data. Kore P. sounds to me like he works for them… I can’t imagine anyone giving this company 5 stars. The first customer service person I spoke with was VERY confused — and seemed to have absolutely NO idea what I was talking about, We get promise after promise and have to keep trying all sorts of bogus things that never work anyway. STAY AWAY!!!

If you love what is on your computer check out crashplan by code 42. It is a very flexible backup solution that works on most platforms. You can back up computer to computer encrypted for free or to their servers for a reasonable fee.