The following is CrashPlan's latest (and clearly the last) reply to this thread. I think it's fair to say that both sides are in agreement about how to "feed the computers" -- which is what people called it when I started my programming career in 1957 -- but mistakes and mis-statements are inevitable. I particularly hope that you at least take the second link, for two reasons: 1) they
do know about metadata, and 2) the documentation style they use seems to be prevalent throughout the CrashPlan system, and I have a great respect for that, as I noted in my post #7: Design, performance, support, and documentation.
Hi Bud,
Thanks for your reply.
While we appreciate you going to bat with some of these people on these forums, that's not really what support is here to do. We are here to resolve our customers technical issues when they arise. Any debating that may happen outside of our support desk is not something our company is really wanting to get into the weeds with. CrashPlan and its backup engine have been around since 2001, so we're verging on being a 20 year old data security/backup and recovery program. We have learned a lot of things along the way, and our program is designed to do some things very well. All I can say is that CrashPlan for Small Business has its advantages, just like other backup programs do.
From all that writing, I will tell you he is right about a couple things. First, he is right about the local backups. We strongly believe you shouldn't rely on a single destination for backup, even our cloud. That’s why CrashPlan gives you the ability to back up to local destinations, and is why we recommend you back up to both onsite and offsite destinations. Second, the internet is indeed usually the biggest bottleneck for backup programs, which is just more of a reason to have local backups like you do. Even if you happen to have a very fast internet connection, it is unlikely that backups to our cloud will be able to match your upload limit.
If you'd like, you can take a look at this article from our support site for more information about the process that CrashPlan uses to back up your files:
How backup works - Code42 Support
Here is an article about what sorts of supported metadata we back up, if that piqued your interest as well:
Supported metadata - Code42 Support
If there's anything that you need technical assistance with regarding your backups or restores, please let me know. If there is no technical issue that you're running into at this time, I'm going to consider this ticket solved.