[Discuss] Attention CrashPlan users

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

For almost two years, I've been using and singing the praises of CrashPlan, a
service of Code42 which provides a user-friendly Java interface for sending
files both to its remote data centers and for sending them between Linux boxes
at your home or those of your friends.  Why I praise the company is pretty
simple:  they let you control whether to escrow ssh keys with them, or retain
them for yourself.

However, the software suffers from a serious flaw.  Before I go blabbing about
it in detail here in a public forum, I'm looking for help.  Their front-line
tech support has thus far spent a week blaming my systems, blowing me off in
all my efforts to point out the opportunity to investigate and resolve a
problem that's central to their business model.

Are you a CrashPlan user?  One who uses the software in peer-to-peer mode
between servers under your control?  What I want you to do is invoke a simple
operation; it's somewhat hidden in their UI but look for the "compact"
command.  Results of this operation aren't reported directly but you can then
click on the History and see whether any errors were found.

But before even doing that:  just in case errors /are/ found, I want to be
able to demonstrate to this company another case of this problem, and in order
to do that you'll need to preserve data-forensics.  So before invoking
"compact", preserve a full copy of the disk volume to which you send CrashPlan
dumps (it will have a directory backupArchives).

I have no financial interest in the outcome of this test, other than as an
aggrieved customer who actually wants to see this company succeed. 
Alternatively, if you have any contacts in the tier-3 engineering support at
Code42, I can make direct contact myself.  But I think their tier-2 support
guy just caused me to blow away the forensic evidence needed to prove my
point. :-(

-rich