CrashPlan crashing (itself) and the host machines

We run CrashPlan for Business (PRO) on several Windows servers and wanted share some of the observations about the local app and the service itself.

The good

Pricing
Pricing is straight forward: it is a flat rate for unlimited data backup. $10/m per machine is dirt cheap. Additionally, the CP client app allows you to back up your data to the CrashPlan cloud but also to the other computer or folders (at no additional free).

Encryption
CP uses Blowfish for encrypting your backed data and it’s a client-side encryption. There’s an ability to reset the encryption password through a security question.

Versioning
CrashPlan, support versioning and it’s enabled by default.

Efficiency
Crashplan utilizes a sophisticated delta-update algorithm along with automatic compression. Which means that CP splits your files into small data chunks. Then each chunk is compressed and encrypted accordingly to your settings. It also supports de-duplication, which means that duplicated files are only uploaded to the backup server only once. This also means that of you move / rename files CP does not need to upload it all over again.

The bad & the ugly

Crashing
On numerous occasions throughout the 2016 Crash Plan updates seemed to have failed crippling the CP instance on many servers. Just last in July we had a situation with two instances of the CP PRO installed and running on the Windows 2012 R2 server. After having removed on from Programs and Features it ran for a few week and it had crashed completely.
Attempting to start the CP service failed so we resorted to “the usual” (recommended by very scarce tech support): download the most recent version,reinstall it and reboot…

Strangely we’ve found that some machines were running two instances of Crash Plan; apparently one 64-bit and the other 32-bit version.
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