Well, yes, it can't be a easy to use lump of coal!

The point I was trying to make was that previous SmartPhone/PDA/Tablet manufacturers focused 90% features 10% user experience (or at least it seems that way, I am sure they would claim they spent a lot of time on the user experience) and because of that those devices always failed to gain widespread traction. Apple's also demonstrated already a few times that even missing features (e.g. Copy & Paste, no custom apps in early iPhone) won't get in the way if the user experience turns out to be amazing.

Overall, I think it's easier for people to deal with missing features than user interface quirks or an inconsistent user experience, but you are right, if it doesn't have at least a good set of capabilities then it's going to fail no matter how beautiful it is.

Hey Nik, I was pretty shocked to hear your report so I did a little digging and also spoke with the CrashPlan folks as well to try and get to the bottom of this for you. The CrashPlan folks got back to me quickly but they also told me they are going to try and get in touch with you to make it right, so keep a look out for a message from them.

Now, what I heard from the CrashPlan team is that new and existing CrashPlan customers do not have anything to worry about as this issue was fixed a while ago and that there is a continuous backup verification process going on so if some how you do have a messed up file in your backup, it will, or rather should have already fixed itself.

Just to be sure however I decided to restore all the files from a CrashPlan backup archive I had laying around that had been created a year ago from a computer I parted with in May and didn't have any file corruption issues. I'm going to try restoring some of my other backups and if I see any problems I'll let everyone know. If anyone else has seen this issue, please post your comments here to let us know.

Your note however made me think of a great blog post I had read recently from Joel Spolsky entitled "Let's stop talking about Backups" Joel makes a great point that if your data is important to you, you shouldn't be thinking about just backing up, but you need to be thinking (and testing!) your ability to restore. I know we all pay money to backup services like CrashPlan so that we don't have to think about that, but it's a good point. Until you have done at least one restore how do you know it really works? All to often we wait to test out backups on the day our hard drive dies and that's probably not the day to do our first test of our backup system if our data is really that important!

Hi Aviv, I'd like to know more about what went wrong and I'm sure my readers would like to know as well so they can trouble shoot or avoid the same issues you had. Can you share more details on what happened and how you noticed something was wrong? Thanks!

Hi Louise, CrashPlan does save previous versions. The length of time and number of versions is entirely up to you (although you need a CrashPlan+ license). Read more on what CrashPlan can do here: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/recipe/reta...

Hi Jani, I've backed up some really huge multi GB files to CrashPlan, with a number of them being larger than 4GB. Also you might want to check out http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/recipe/reta... which describes all the CrashPlan retention settings, no need to worry about any 30 day limit!

Rick, see the reply from Renee below, she's great at getting to the bottom of any issue you might be having and helped me during my original review.

One thing I can speak to is that I've not noticed any performance or connection issues and I'm backing up a lot of stuff to CrashPlan. Good luck!

Jani, I recommend you look into the family plan, if you pay for 3 years of service in advance it comes out to something like 5 dollars a month, that's a great value just comparing that to the price of an external hard drive. I have a setup similar to yours with a laptop and a server with a 4TB RAID5 array and with the family plan I backup everything on all my systems to CrashPlan Central. I've got well over a TB backed up and I'm adding GB of data every week without any issues. If you have a lot of files to backup and are worried how long it's going to take you should check out the "seed your backup" option

Hi Brian, you sure can. In my setup I backup to a friend and also to CrashPlan Central (2 destinations) but you could just as easily have your laptop backup to your home server and CrashPlan Central as well.

Thanks Matthew! Ah ha! scheduled at idle explains why it wasn't too painful when it used 100% CPU (I was wondering) but it definitely used whatever it could get it's hands on which confused me because I thought I had it set on 20%. Maybe that is the ideal way to handle things when it's "analyzing". If you can minimize the times when a backup gets interrupted then I doubt many people will ever notice or be annoyed by it. Also, thanks for the tip on the zip file, I don't know how I missed that, i'll update my article to address that.

Thanks for sharing your experience BSmith. You might be interested to know I've just started testing CrashPlan Central and will have a review up in a week or so. I'm backing up about 140 GB of data and I'm documenting my experience using the service every day for my review as well as my interactions with their support team. Some might know that I've been a CrashPlan+ user for years but never used their CrashPlan Central online backup service because it was too expensive. That all changed a few months ago when they dropped their price to less than Carbonite's lowest price. Stay tuned for my update I promise my review is going to be through as always.