CrashPlan Slow?

Comments

20 responses to “CrashPlan Slow?”

1. 

   Karl

   Think I got it! Tried all the tricks in the forums and on Crashplans site, but no improvement. My speeds were locked at ~1.3 Mbps. I’m on a dedicated 10Mbps up & down line. After reading this article checked my speed with speakeasy.net and got terrible results. ran the same test using my local ISP and got slightly better results.

   Then on a whim switched my gateway to the new firewall that I’m setting up to replace a very old one. Wham! finally getting decent speeds -hovers between 5.1Mbps and 5.5Mbps. Still not sure why it isn’t going up to 10 Mbps (UTM too low?), but can live with this speed. Speakeasy.net now giving great speed test results. I’m thinking some rules are out of whack on the old on the old firewall or it’s not able to process fast enough. I’m not going to spend the time to figure out what the issue was.

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   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      Good to hear you found out what the problem was.

      Reply
2. 

   Jamie Dolan

   The speed issues are all solved. I’ve been getting full speeds again now for well over a month.

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   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      That is good to hear. I thought it might have gotten better since the noise on Twitter and Facebook seemed to settle down.

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   2. 

      John Baxendale

      Not for me, I’m still seeing a max of 1.2 mbps.

      Reply
3. 

   John Freer

   Holy Cow, CrashPlan must be paying attention. Upload speeds have gotten much faster!

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   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      That is good to hear. I have not been watching my speed to CrashPlan lately. Been busy running other software and writing new reviews. :)

      Reply
4. 

   darkbill

   I’m in the UK, and recently had fibre installed offering 75mbps down and 20mbps up. When first installed, the engineer tested the line and I was getting the max, of course this settles down over time. On average, in speed tests, I’m getting around 60mbps down and 15/16mbps up.

   All sounds good, but on Crashplan I’m lucky if I get more than 300kbps. It starts off at max speed but drops down almost instantly.

   I got an engineer out to check the line and also the check the exchange to make sure there wasn’t a bottleneck.

   We tried it on three machines – two PC’s and a Mac – and speeds were the same. Just on Crashplan.

   I’ve started trialling Backblaze, which does seem faster, but still not hitting what I’d consider a decent Upload rate. I’m getting about 7GB up a day.

   So I’m still confused as to the root of the problem. I’ve configured both Crashplan and Backblaze to optimise uploads (based on their recommendations) but not making a huge difference.

   My internet is pretty much committed to backups so can’t see any other internet traffic that could be getting in the way.

   I’ve raised a ticket with Crashplan and suggested routing my data to a closer datacentre, i.e. in Ireland, but I’ve found out this centre is currently only handling enterprise clients.

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   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      Thanks for your comment. Nice to see some solid evidence that yes CrashPlan does seem to be having some problems.

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   2. 

      Ben

      Yep – having the same here. Working in the UK at a university have access to anywhere up to 80 mbps upload (this varies hugely). But trying crashplan recently it would max out a 2.3 which really isn’t taking advantage. Backblaze however is happy to use as much as it can, in fact it backed up 300 gb of data in around 3 days as opposed to crashplan which wanted to take 30+ days to do the same.

      Reply
5. 

   Disgrintled user

   CrashPlan is clearly broken as it stands. There is a plethora of complaints on its Facebook page about the slow upload issue.

   In fact, CrashPlan has acknowledged the issue. This is not a case of people not understanding how fast their internet connection is.

   It’s a case of CrashPlan over-selling its service during the Black Friday sales when they were literally giving away the product for nothing.

   What a disaster of a company it is.

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   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      Well I don’t know if I would go so far as saying they are a disaster. It certainly does appear that they have oversold the capacity of their data center(s) but why does it only seem to bother some users and not others? It would be interesting to map where users are and what the upload speeds are.

      Reply
6. 

   Gary

   Thanks for your blog post on this. I have had a considerable slowing of the upload speed for CrashPlan from averaging around 2Mbps to, lately, only 200 Kbps. That is a reduction from a decent speed that I was happy with to a very slow speed that is not acceptable. I like CrashPlan and so will see if this gets fixed. They have good support, and if it doesn’t, will contact them.

   One issue I have with CrashPlan is their approach to restore. One cannot restore based on comparison to what has been lost on a PC. One has to either select files or restore everything. There is no option to just restore missing files.

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   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      That is a significant reduction. How fast of upload does Speedtest.net or a similar tool give you?

      I found when CrashPlan was de-duplicating files I would get really fast speeds, like 5Mbps, which is not possible on my connection.

      Reply
   2. 

      chris faron

      Same issue for me in Italy, gone from 800 Kbps down to 60 Kbps . Got to be a server issue. I have the family plan and another PC on the same LAN that was setup more recently uploads at least 3 times as fast.

      Reply
      1. 

         Daniel

         Chris, I used to get very slow speeds like that during my free trial (not a great first impression, hehe). I contacted support, and they confirmed they were having issues with the particular cluster my backup was assigned to. It went back to normal after about 2 days. Best to just contact them and ask whether there are any issues on the server side. Unfortunately they don’t have a server status page.

         That being said, some slowdown is to be expected due to the de-duplication ‚Äì although not to the sub-0.1M range you’re seeing. The more data you’ve already got stored on your account, the more stuff new data needs to be compared against. There’s an article on the web somewhere about tricks to speed up CrashPlan’s initial backup. One of the hints is to disable de-duplication. It’s of course not recommended by CrashPlan, but you might want to give it a try, if just to rule out that this is what you’re experiencing.

         My own upload speeds to both CrashPlan and BackBlaze have improved considerably lately. I’ve dumped my previous CrashPlan backup and got reassigned to a new server for the new one. I now have a consistent 5-7 Mbps upstream. It rarely dips below 3 Mbps, and occasionally gets close to 9 Mbps at night (actual upload, not de-duplication). So it *is* possible to get good upload speeds from Europe. BackBlaze actually overtook CrashPlan now, though. A recent client update of theirs allows multi-threaded upload, and me setting it to 10 threads has sped up the upload at almost a flat 10x factor. I used to get around 1.5 Mbps and now have a nice, stable 14-16 Mbps.

         Reply
7. 

   Laura

   Hi,

   You’ve made some great points in your article and I, too, believe that most issues with Crashplans speed are because people just don’t know how fast their Internet connection is or they get fooled by their ISPs because they advertise with:”up to xxx mbit/s” where up to means they don’t have to guarantee anything and people automatically think they get the advertised speeds.

   For us, however, it is different, because we are based in Germany, and in fact Crashplan seems to have trouble with getting a decent upload speed that matches our Internet connection for people overseas. We tried a lot of different network settings but couldn’t resolve the issue.

   Thanks for your post!

   Reply
   1. 

      Cloud Storage Buzz Team

      It is quite possible that CrashPlan has a problem like over selling. ISPs and web hosts have a long history of over selling servers and customers then complaining that servers are slow etc etc. You can only fit so much data through before you need to upgrade hardware. I would not be surprised if we hear soon that CrashPlan has invested in more server space. Of course being in Europe you could just be far enough away that you will never get better speed to North America.

      I appreciate the comment but I removed your link. Hope you understand :) . I need to pay the bills as well. Nice site though.

      Reply
   2. 

      John Baxendale

      There may be some people unaware of their upload speed, but I can assure I’m very aware of my bandwidth and CrashPlan *is* slow.

      I have 10mbit of upstream bandwidth and can happily get that to most sites, using SpeedTest.net to servers in various countries, by uploading torrents etc.

      I never see more than 1.3mbit speeds from CrashPlan and most of the time this sits around the 900kbit mark. This is not a great speed, they need to invest in their bandwidth.

      I’ve also tried the speed up tips mentioned in the CrashPlan support article but they’ve made no difference. I’m going to contact support but then I think I’ll be closing my account. I signed up in the hope it was just the demo server which is slow, but no such luck.

      CrashPlan, not fast enough, sorry.

      Reply
   3. 

      Daniel

      I agree with the assumption that many people complaining about the upload speed might be from overseas. Crashplan still only has servers in the US, which for the most part leads to very underwhelming upload speeds for users in Europe, Asia, etc. They say they’re working on setting up a data centre in the UK, but that it will still take some time. (If and when they get there, I hope there’ll be a way to migrate a backup ‚Äì would hate to have to re-upload my 3TB).

      Most other sites that a majority people are likely to ever upload larger amounts of data to, like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook etc. generally have a number of data centres around the world, and you’ll automatically upload to a close one to which you get a good link. If you force those sites to use US servers, you’ll see similar speeds as you get to Crashplan.

      I’m in Switzerland and on a fibre plan with 20 Mbps upstream. I generally get an average between 1-2 Mbps to Crashplan during the day. At night time I’ll generally have about 3-5 Mbps, although I’ve sustained 15-20 a couple of times too. That’s probably largely due simply to the global amount of traffic crossing the Atlantic, seeing as it seems related to European daytime activity, and not American daytime where Crashplan’s servers are. I also use Backblaze, and see pretty much the same average speeds there.

      It’ll be nice when Crashplan moves closer to home for me. And of course it would be nice to have 20 Mbps around the clock. But I’d also say that I’m okay with the speed considering what the service is for. For an online backup, it’s usually just the one-time initial backup that takes long enough for it to really matter much.

      Reply