"CrashPlan's client is terrible. It hogs RAM always, absolutely throttles my hard drive at times, and is generally very frustrating to work with. The backup engine on my headless server crashes for no apparent reason and won't automatically restart. My Mac backs up to my PC, and the status has been "No files selected" for days, despite the fact that it's been backing up for months now.
Generally speaking, CrashPlan's system is poorly architected, and they've never taken the time to implement proper software. Running everything on top of Java may make it easy to support any platform, but it's hell on performance and terrible for resource usage. According to their documentation, the engine needs about 1GB of RAM per terabyte of files in the backup set, which is absurd.
I'm definitely going to consider switching, even though it'll take months to reupload everything to a new service, because CrashPlan is just frustrating and I keep having to fight it to keep it working."
- dgw