[Discuss] Attention CrashPlan users

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On 01/31/2013 02:02 AM, Rich Braun wrote:
> 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 just started using CrashPlan a few weeks ago, and am backing up one
desktop and one server to another server.  I'll try to do that this week.

Before I do this, can you tell me what happened and how you recognized
it?  Did it corrupt the backup?