Crashplan / Cloud Based Storage Question - HELP!

[davidrosen]

Hi,

My girlfriend is a photographer and has over 6TB of raw photos and photoshop files. She's currently using Crashplan to back it all up (I am a music composer and I use it too).

Recently Crashplan announced everyone needs to switch from Home to Pro, and in the process they deleted the vast majority of her backups by accident. Here's how it happened:

Lets say the internal harddrive folder D:\Pictures is set to sync. Over months and months that syncs multiple GB of data and all is good.

Then because she needed more storage internally, she moved the files and folders out of D:\Pictures onto an external drive to free up room on the internal drive.

Apparently, now Crashplan thinks those files were deleted, and so the files are deleted from her Crashplan Backup!

Now it turns out that when this happens, they actually aren't permanently deleted but moved to a closed off section called "Deleted Files" that can still be restored from BUT... Big but here... BUT during the migration process from Home to Pro, any files sitting in the Deleted Files area get permanently deleted for real.

So this is an absolute disaster as you can imagine, and reuploading almost 6TB of data (the most recent 100GB or so that was sitting in the D:\Pictures and some various other folders that were being synced are still in Crashplan) is going to take forever. But after doing some research I THINK we're going to stick with Crashplan. It's an absolute shame that this happened, but I'm not really seeing that any of the other services out there would have been any different in this regard... Even Google with their $99/month 10TB Drive plan appears to operate in a somewhat similar fashion from what one of their support people just told me.

SO that brings us to the question... what process can we use to avoid this in the future? Either a file management process or an actual Crashplan setting to make it so that when we move folders to a different drive, they're still synced.

Here's what I'm thinking, and I'm not sure if it will work, and when Crashplan opens back up for support on Monday morning I'm going to talk to someone, but I figured I'd ask here while I'm waiting:

Everything in D:\Pictures is synced right. Lets use one folder name as an example, D:\Pictures\December2017Pics is synced. I then move that folder to an external drive, E:\Pictures\December 2017Pics. In Crashplan's setting, I already have that everything in D:\Pictures and E:\Pictures will both always be synced. So as soon as Crashplan sees this new folder called December2017Pics in E:\Pictures it should start syncing it... BUT it should see that it already had that folder and all the same files inside of it previously in D: and not make a duplicate upload, just change the location... Hopefully... Maybe... Any idea if I'm right?

I really appreciate any help on this. Once I figure this out I'm going to have to adjust my own process on my own computer too since I use Crashplan and probably have tons of missing folders from all the stuff I've moved around to new external drives and stuff... Ugh...

 

[USAFRet]

Salient text...

reuploading almost 6TB of data

DO NOT DO THAT.

Local backups first.
$200-$300 for an 8-10TB drive, or a little more for a local NAS box.

Crashplan as a tertiary backup at most. This only to ward off robbery/fire/flood/gas explosion...

Please do not depend on a cloud service as you primary storage, or even your primary backup location.
As you've seen, they can and do change their terms of service at their corporate whim.


Your current primary concern...is your data still accessible, from wherever it lives?
If so, buy a 8-10TB USB connected drive.
Copy ALL that gunk you would be storing in Crashplan to this new drive.

Then you can investigate your actual storage and backup needs.

 

[davidrosen]

Oh sorry I should make that clear... YES local backup is taken care of! Thankfully we were prepared and have two external hard drive copies of pretty much everything!

But we still want some kind of cloud based solution for worst case scenario and they do seem to be the best as far as we can tell, but it's this one issue with the setup that is throwing everything off. And like I said, Google Drive apparently works this way too... I'm guessing were gonna find most of the cloud backup systems work this way too...

 

[USAFRet]

So all of your data is actually backed up? Not the single copy, but actual second copy backups?
And Crashplan was the tertiary?

 

[davidrosen]

Well technically crashplan was the 2nd copy but we're literally in the middle of making 2nd external hard drive copies right now haha, so once we get crashplan going again it will become the third.

 

[USAFRet]

PC = Primary
USB drives or NAS = secondary
Crashplan or Google or cloud = tertiary, at best.

That tertiary cloud thing can go away at the whim of a boardroom spreadsheet. Plan for that.

 

[davidrosen]

Yeah the problem with that is with her 6TB and growing all the time of data (she's trying to at least cut it down some but it's not gonna be much), there really can't be a PC copy of anything but the newest like 6-12 months of data. Everything else is constantly getting moved off to externals that need a backup and then a cloud backup on top of it.

 

[USAFRet]

Yeah the problem with that is with her 6TB and growing all the time of data (she's trying to at least cut it down some but it's not gonna be much), there really can't be a PC copy of anything but the newest like 6-12 months of data. Everything else is constantly getting moved off to externals that need a backup and then a cloud backup on top of it.

A one time investment of a good 4 bay NAS box and 6-8-10TB drives to fill it...
Upload only the critical stuff to the cloud.

Or, create your own 'cloud'. The newer NAS boxes from Qnap, Synology, or others can talk to each other over the internet, syncing as desired.
One at your location, another at a remote location.