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Reviews

A comparison of CrashPlan and Backblaze

I’ve been a paying CrashPlan customer since 2012 and my initial backup still hasn’t finished. I’ve been a paying Backblaze customer for less than a month and my initial backup is already complete. 

I’m not a typical customer for backup companies. Most people back up about 1 TB of data or less. The size of my minimum backup set is about 9 TB. If I count all the stuff I want to back up, it’s about 12 TB. And that’s a problem with most backup services.

First, let me say this: I didn’t write this post to trash CrashPlan. Their backup service works and it’s worked well for other members of my family. It just hasn’t worked for me. This is because they only offer a certain amount of bandwidth to each user. It’s called bandwidth throttling and it saves them money in two ways: (1) they end up paying less for their monthly bandwidth (which adds up to a lot for a company offering backup services) and (2) they filter out heavy users like me, who tend to fill up a lot of their drives with unprofitable data. My guess (from my experience with them) is that they throttle heavy users with large backup sets much more than they throttle regular users. The end result of this bandwidth throttling is that, even though I’ve been a customer since 2012 — at first, I was on the individual backup plan, then I switched to the family plan — my initial backup never completed and I was well on track to never completing it.

When I stopped using CrashPlan’s backup services, out of the almost 9 TB of data that I need to back up constantly, I had only managed to upload 0.9 TB in FOUR YEARS. Take a moment and think about that, and then you’ll realize how much bandwidth throttling CrashPlan does on heavy users like me.

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After four years of continuous use, I backed up a grand total of 905.7 GB to CrashPlan

To be exact, counting the various versions of my data that had accummulated on the CrashPlan servers in these four years, I had a total of 2.8 TB stored on their servers, but even if you count that as the total, 2.8 TB in FOUR YEARS is still an awfully small amount.

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Space used on CrashPlan’s servers: 2.8 TB

Tell me honestly, which one of you wants this kind of service from a backup company? You pay them for years in a row and your initial backup never finishes? If a data loss event occurs and your local backup is gone (say a fire, flood or burglary), you’re pretty much screwed and you’ll only be able to recover a small portion of your data from their servers, even though you’ve been a faithful, paying customer for years… That just isn’t right.

I talked with CrashPlan techs twice in these fours years about this very problematic data throttling. Given that they advertise their service as “unlimited backup”, this is also an ethical issue. The backup isn’t truly unlimited if it’s heavily throttled and you can never back up all of your data. The answer was the same both times, even the wording was the same, making me think it was scripted: they said that in an effort to keep costs affordable, they have to limit the upload speeds of every user. The first time I asked them, they suggested their Business plan has higher upload speeds, so in other words, they tried to upsell me. During both times, they advertised their “seed drive service”, which was a paid product (they stopped offering it this summer). The gist of their paid service was that they shipped asking customers a 1 TB drive so you could back up to it locally, then send it to them to jumpstart the backup. Again, given my needs of backing up at least 9 TB of data, this wasn’t a userful option.

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This is false advertising

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This is also false advertising

Some of you might perhaps suggest that I didn’t optimize my CrashPlan settings so that I could get the most out of it. I did. I tried everything they suggested in their online support notes. In addition to tricking out my Crashplan install, my computer has been on for virtually all of the last four years, in an effort to help the Crashplan app finish the initial backup, to no avail.

Another thing that bothered me about CrashPlan is that it would go into “maintenance mode” very often, and given the size of my backup set, this would take days, sometimes weeks, during which it wouldn’t back up. It would endlessly churn through its backup versions and compare them to my data, pruning out stuff, doing its own thing and eating up processor cycles with those activities instead of backing up my data.

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Synchronizing block information…

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Compacting data… for 22.8 days…

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Maintaining backup files…

I understand why maintenance of the backups is important. But what I don’t understand is why it took so long. I can’t help thinking that maybe the cause is the Java-based backup engine that CrashPlan uses. It’s not a Mac-native app or a Windows-native app. It’s a Java app wrapped in Mac and Windows app versions. And most Java apps aren’t known for their speed. It’s true, Java apps could be fast, but the developers often get lazy and don’t optimize the code — or that’s the claim made by some experts in online forums.

Another way to look at this situation is that CrashPlan has a “freemium” business model. In other words, their app is free to use for local (DAS or NAS) backup or offsite backup (such as to a friend’s computer). And one thing I know is that you can’t complain about something that’s given freely to you. If it’s free, you either offer constructive criticism or you shut up about it. It’s free and the developers are under no obligation to heed your feedback or to make changes because you say so. As a matter of fact, I used CrashPlan as a free service for local backup for a couple of years before I started paying for their cloud backup service. But it was only after I started paying that I had certain expectations of performance. And in spite of those unmet expectations, I stuck with them for four years, patiently waiting for them to deliver on their promise of “no storage limits, bandwidth throttling or well-engineered excuses”… and they didn’t deliver.

Here I should also say that CrashPlan support is responsive. Even when I was using their free backup service, I could file support tickets and get answers. They always tried to resolve my issues. That’s a good thing. It’s important to point this out, because customer service is an important aspect of a business in the services industry — and online backups are a service.

About three weeks ago, I was talking with Mark Fuccio from Drobo about my issues with CrashPlan and he suggested I try Backblaze, because they truly have no throttling. So I downloaded the Backblaze app (which is a native Mac app, not a Java app), created an account and started to use their service. Lo and behold, the 15-day trial period wasn’t yet over and my backup to their servers was almost complete! I couldn’t believe it! Thank you Mark! 🙂

I optimized the Backblaze settings by allowing it to use as much of my ISP bandwidth as it needed (I have a 100 Mbps connection), and I also bumped the number of backup threads to 10, meaning the Backblaze app could initiate 10 separate instances of itself and upload all 10 instances simultaneously to their servers. I did have to put up with a slightly sluggish computer during the initial backup, but for the first time in many years, I was able to back up all of my critical data to the cloud. I find that truly amazing in and of itself.

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This is what I did to optimize my Backblaze installation

As you can see from the image above, I got upload speeds over 100 Mbps when I optimized the backup settings. During most of the days of the initial upload, I actually got speeds in excess of 130 Mbps, which I think is pretty amazing given my situation: I live in Romania and the Backblaze servers are in California, so my data had to go through a lot of internet backbones and through the trans-Atlantic cables.

The short of it is that I signed up for a paid plan with Backblaze and my initial backup completed in about 20 days. Let me state that again: I backed up about 9 TB of data to Backblaze in about 20 days, and I managed to back up only about 1 TB of data to CrashPlan in about 4 years (1420 days). The difference is striking and speaks volumes about the ridiculous amount of throttling that CrashPlan puts in place for heavy users like me.

I also use CrashPlan for local network backup to my Drobo 5N, but I may switch to another app for this as well, for two reasons: it’s slow and it does a lot of maintenance on the backup set and because it doesn’t let me use Drobo shares mapped through the Drobo Dashboard app, which is a more stable way of mapping a Drobo’s network shares. CrashPlan refuses to see those shares and requires me to manually map network shares, which isn’t as stable a connection and leads to share disconnects and multiple mounts, which is something that screws up CrashPlan. I’m trying out Mac Backup Guru, which is a Mac-native app, is pretty fast and does allow me to back up to Drobo Dashboard-mapped shares. If this paragraph doesn’t make sense to you, it’s okay. You probably haven’t run into this issue. If you have, you know what I’m talking about.

Now, none of this stuff matters if you’re a typical user of cloud backup services. If you only have about 1 TB of data or less, any cloud backup service will likely work for you. You’ll be happy with CrashPlan and you’ll be happy with their customer service. But if you’re like me and you have a lot of data to back up, then a service like Backblaze that is truly throttle-free is exactly what you’ll need.

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Thoughts

Here’s to the simple solutions

For the past couple of days, Mail had stopped working. It couldn’t connect to the email servers for some reasons and kept taking my accounts offline. I knew I hadn’t changed any of its settings. In all my years of using a Mac (since 1994), I’d never run into a situation where Mail settings had gotten corrupted, but I was now willing to look into it. I kept looking at all sorts of scenarios and guides online — things such as these (1, 2, 3, 4) — but nothing helped.

Then it occurred to me that three days ago, as I worked late, past midnight, I got the bright idea to switch the firewall level to High from Medium. “Oh, let’s get some extra protection, shall we?” My router is one of these gizmos handed to me by my ISP, it’s a ZTE that came with no printed documentation and barely any online documentation beyond “this is ON button, this is internet port”. So how was I to know that switching it to High would mean all traffic other than port 25 and 80 would be closed off? But that’s what happened. I did it, forgot about it, and when my email stopped working, it took me a couple of days to connect the dots.

I’m writing this down for you because it’s a great reminder that sometimes the simple solutions are the best (and possibly the only) ones. That, plus writing down changes to the internet configs, especially when I’m working late… Sure, I could have taken a dive into deep-level Mail documentation and email servers and the intricacies of setting up IMAP and opened up ports on my firewall and deleted my Mail settings and set up everything again, but all it took was me logging onto the ISP router and switching the firewall back down to Medium. Less than a minute vs. hours and hours of needless work.

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Good to know, right?

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How To, Reviews

How to watch Netflix from abroad

At the start of 2009, when I left the US to spend most of the year abroad, I was an avid Netflix subscriber, and I looked forward to being one even as I lived abroad. There was a loophole in the Netflix protocols which allowed my wife and I to watch movies from outside the US (see this post), but they plugged it very quickly — within three days after I wrote about it.

I was, needless to say, very disappointed. Here I was, a US citizen, with a US mailing address, a US bank account and a US credit card, wanting to watch movies legally instead of downloading them from torrent websites, not able to do it, just because my IP address happened to be from another country. This was not fair. I cancelled my subscription. In hindsight, my anger was unnecessary. The situation is probably a result of certain stipulations in their contracts with the movie studios.

Still, there’s obviously a need for a legal way to watch movies online, right? And until Netflix (or another company) decides to open up their servers to paying customers from all over the world (which I hear might happen), here’s how to watch Netflix from abroad, right now.

You’ll need:

  1. A US credit card and a US mailing address. If you’re from the US but you happen to be abroad, great, you’re in luck, because you probably still have both of these. If you’re not from the US, see if you can make some arrangements with friends in the US.
  2. A VPN connection that will give you a US IP address, or a DNS Proxy Service subscription which will make Netflix and other US streaming sites think you’re based in the US. 
  3. A computer that’s compatible with Netflix Streaming. At this time, I believe only Mac and Windows computers can do it. The last time I tried it, a Linux machine wasn’t compatible. You could get a Netflix-compatible device or media appliance but if you want to keep things simple, stick with a computer.

That’s all you’ll need.

The DNS Proxy Service is a fairly new offering and is, in my opinion, the easiest way to configure your device to watch Netflix from abroad, without installing any additional software or configuring a custom VPN connection. You simply change the DNS servers for your network card (see these instructions).

Now let me talk a bit about the VPN service. In the two years I’ve spent abroad, I’ve used two services: AceVPN and HideMyNet. I’m currently using HideMyNet for my VPN service, and I’ve been using them for the past four months. Both cost about the same, but from my experience, HideMyNet has faster, more reliable service.

I started out with AceVPN but after several months, I started getting a lot of buffering messages when watching Netflix (you know, where you wait for it to load up the movie). It would take minutes, sometimes 5-10 minutes to load up a movie, and toward the end of my subscription with them, the movie would stop playing multiple times as we watched it, and we had to wait for it to rebuffer. It was annoying, particularly when the movie stopped playing during a gripping scene. Who knows, perhaps they were experiencing growing pains or temporary issues with their servers…

Out of the blue, the folks from HideMyNet contacted me to see if I wanted to try their service and write about it. Disclaimer: they offered me a 1-year subscription to give an honest opinion about their service. I told them I would, but that I’d need to try out their service thoroughly before I spoke about it, and if I found anything negative, I was going to reveal that as well. That was back in April of this year. It’s now August, four months later, and after all this time, I can definitely recommend them.

I do have a few pieces of advice for you:

  • If you’re not sure how to set up a VPN connection as L2TP or PPTP on your Mac, go with OpenVPN and Tunnelblick. Check out their setup instructions for the details. If you’re on Windows, setting up an L2TP connection is super easy and takes only a few minutes.
  • Make sure to ask their Tech Support which of their servers would be faster for you. Here’s some general advice I got from them on this issue: “Generally you want to connect to whichever server is closest to you [geographically]. If you’re in the EU you should try our DC and NYC servers. If you’re in Asia you should try the Seattle or LA servers. If you’re in South America you should try the Dallas and LA servers.” 
  • They currently have a limit of two simultaneously connected devices, so keep that in mind. I believe Netflix has the same limit, but if you were, for example, watching Netflix on one computer and browsing the internet on another, both through their VPN service, you wouldn’t be able to, for example, connect a third device (computer or phone) through the VPN service until you disconnected one of other two.

So there you have it. That’s how you can watch Netflix from abroad. It’s simple, it’s easy and it’s legal.

On a side note, I can’t understand why movie studios prefer to hang on to costly and outdated ways of distributing content, and thus encourage piracy, instead of promoting lower-cost, easily available methods of renting or purchasing their content, for any customer, anywhere. There are many people who would rather pay than use torrents, but the cost is either too high, or there’s no way to pay even if they wanted to. Thank goodness for VPN technology, otherwise I’d start thinking about using the torrents as well.

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Thoughts

What comes after High Definition?

Producing (set design, lighting, filming, directing, editing) my wife’s cooking show has gotten me thinking about what comes after HD, because there obviously is a large discrepancy in resolution between full 1080p HD and properly exposed 35mm film (up to 3500p) — as I already mentioned in my post on preserving classic movies.

Yes, high definition is a huge improvement over standard definition, which in turn was a large improvement over early television signals. But televisions and VCRs, in spite of their popularity, are a dismal failure in picture quality compared to what they replaced: film reels and projectors.

Nowadays, we’ve gained some foothold back when it comes to consumer/prosumer video quality. We have ready access to video cameras that will record in HD (at various qualities, given the model and the price), and we have newer computers and televisions that will allow us to play back those videos at their native (720p or 1080p) resolutions. Even websites have begun in recent years to allow us to play back HD videos, and the quality of broadband internet connections has increased to the point where one doesn’t have to wait a half hour or more in order to download/buffer an HD video and play it properly on their computer. We can even play back HD videos from the internet directly on our televisions, thanks to standalone or built-in media players.

But if we’re to get back to the quality of 35mm film and best it, we must keep moving forward. Thankfully, some visionaries have already taken the first steps and have come up with a camera that can record at a similar-to-film resolution: the RED One, which can give us 2300p of extremely high definition digital video. It’s not quite 3000p or 3500p (which would be the equivalent of properly exposed film), but it gets us pretty close, and it’s certainly much better than 1080p.

The RED camera captures each frame of video as a 12-bit RAW image, which means we, as videographers, have much greater freedom than before when editing the video, just like photographers do when they switch from JPG to RAW files. All of a sudden, white balance, exposure, recovery, blacks, vibrance, saturation, and tone adjustments can be made with much more accuracy.

One area where I’d love to see more improvement — although I’m sure it’ll come with time — is RED’s ability to capture more color depth, say 14-bit or 16-bit. Bit depth is still an area where improvement can be made across the board when it comes to digital cameras.

But let’s leave tech specs alone, and think about how we can edit and enjoy the videos we could make with a RED camera. That’s where difficulties come in, because you see, we still can’t properly do that, certainly not with consumer, and not even with prosumer equipment. No, we’d be looking at professional equipment and serious prices. The market just hasn’t caught up.

There are no computers that can display that kind of resolution at full screen, and there are no televisions that can do it, either. TVs and computers are still caught up in the world of 720p and 1080p. And to make things even more complicated, now we’ve got to worry about 3D video, which is nice for some applications, but from my point of view, it’s a distraction, because it adds yet another barrier, another detour, on the road to achieving proper video resolution across the board. Manufacturers, TV stations and filmmakers are jumping on the 3D bandwagon, when they should be worried about resolution.

So, what costs would a filmmaker be looking at if he or she wanted to shoot at the highest possible digital resolution available today (a RED setup)? I crunched some numbers, and mind you, these are just approximations. The costs are likely to be 1.5-2x that much when you account for everything you might need. On a side note, the folks at RED and at Final Cut Pro have worked together quite a bit to ensure that we can edit RED video natively, directly in Final Cut Pro, on a Mac. See this video for an overview.

  • RED One camera: $25,000
  • 35mm RED lens: $4,250
  • 18-85mm RED lens: $9,975
  • RED LCD: $2,500
  • RED CF media and cards: $1,500
  • RED rig: about $2,500
  • add extra $$$ for power, accessories, tripods, other media, etc.
  • RED video card, for encoding and editing video: $4,750
  • Mac Pro editing station: about $7,000-$12,000, depending on your needs, and you may need more than one of these, depending on how big your production is
  • 30″ display: about $1,000-$3,000, depending on your needs, and you may need more than one of these as well, depending on the number of workstations and your display setup
  • Final Cut Studio software: $1,000
  • HDD-based storage for editing and archival: $2,000-$20,000, depending on your needs
  • LTO tape or additional HDD-based storage for backup: costs will vary quite a bit here
  • Specialized cinema hardware and display for showing movies at full resolution: I have no idea what this costs, but it’s likely to go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and not every cinema has it

So at a minimum, we’d be talking about an investment of more than $60,000 in order to work with a RED setup today.

But let’s not get tied up in talking solely about RED cameras. Clearly the entire industry needs to take steps in order to ensure that videos at resolutions greater than 1080p HD can be played across all the usual devices. Unfortunately, they’re still tied up in SD and HD video. Most TV channels still transmit in SD or lower-than-SD video quality (lower than 480p). It’s true, most have always transmitted at broadcast quality (500p or better) but we’ve always had to contend with a lot of signal loss. And nowadays, we still have to pay extra for HD channels, even though they should be the norm, and we should be looking forward.

To that effect, computer displays need to get bigger and better, computer hardware needs to get faster, computer storage needs to expand, media players need to increase their processing power, televisions need to get better and bigger, and broadband internet needs to get faster, ideally around the gigabit range (see this talk from Vinton Cerf on that subject), so that full resolution, 4000K video can move across the internet easily.

For now, if I were to start working on RED, I’d still have to output to 720p or 1080p and keep my full resolution originals archived for another day, somewhere in the future, when consumer-grade electronics have evolved to the point where they can play my videos and films natively.

I for one look forward to the day when YouTube starts to stream 3500p videos, and when we can all play them conveniently and at full resolution on our computers and televisions!

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Reviews

Internet access in Romania still much better than USA

Remember this article of mine, where I shared my thoughts on why broadband speeds are so far behind just about every other country in the USA? Well, the difference has just gotten even greater.

A little under two months ago, I helped my parents in the US upgrade their broadband from AT&T’s unreliable and slow ADSL to Comcast’s digital cable. This means they went from speeds of 2-3 Mbps down and 512 Kbps up (with AT&T) to 15-16 Mbps down and 3-4 Mbps up with Comcast. That was a huge improvement, but it’s still nothing compared to what is available in Romania at the moment.

Here, Birotec (my ISP) has increased their broadband speeds ten-fold this month. That means I just went from 3 Mbps to 30 Mbps. We went by their store today to pay our bill, and while talking with the customer service rep, I found out about the upgrade. She said it quite matter of factly, as if it was no big deal. It’s a huge deal to me! With Birotec, I can get speeds up to 100 Mbps if I want to. And the broadband speed is almost symmetric upstream and downstream, because it’s built on a fiber optic backbone. I went to speedtest.net and tested my speed today. I’m getting even greater download speeds than advertised, which is amazing. I get speeds up to 54 Mbps downstream!

Do you want to know the best part? It still costs me only €10/month for all this blazing speed, and I get a free telephone plan thrown in as well, with my own number. In the US, it costs my parents over $50/month for internet access with Comcast, and if they wanted a phone plan, the price would go up by another $30-40.

Romtelecom, Romania’s largest telephone and internet provider, has also increased their broadband speeds. They’ve begun using a new DSL technology called VDSL, and they’re offering broadband plans at speeds up to 30 Mbps downstream and 6 Mbps upstream. Incidentally, their largest plan (30 Mbps) also costs about €10/month, but you’ve got to keep in mind it’s still DSL and the uplink speeds are slower. Plus, phone service will cost you extra.

I’d love to know which companies can offer the same speeds in the US, and at similar prices. Short of Verizon’s fiber optic network, which is only deployed in limited metro areas, and still costs more, what else is there?

And that begs me to repeat my original question: why are broadband speeds so slow in the US?

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