I set up CrashPlan a long time ago and it's been doing its thing. Didn't think much of it, never needed to use it. I'm using the free version of CrashPlan to back up stuff from my home machine to my work machine, and of course I'm using Time Machine on both boxes, and anything that really matters is on Github or otherwise "out there". As such, CrashPlan is really only for the "whoops, my home machine got stolen / caught fire" case.

Anyway, over the last few days, CrashPlanServer has been humming along at 350% CPU usage (on a six-core CPU) for no apparent purpose, and crashing / auto-restarting every few minutes. It seems that CrashPlan has been auto-updating itself, but maybe not perfectly. I uninstalled and reinstalled and it's seeming happier now, but I'm still suspicious.

When poking around for online advice about this, I'm seeing things suggesting killing off the server during the day, or suggesting you give its Java VM more memory. What I'm not seeing are consistent bug reports about this problem. What did catch my attention, however, is that the "use your friend's machine for free" mode of operation is only supported by CrashPlan 4, and they're already on to CrashPlan 5 for enterprise-ish things, wherein there's no free version. CrashPlan 5 was released over a year ago, leading me to wonder whether I'm living in a world of unsupported flake-ware and it's time to move on.

So... do I need to move on to something else? I'm sure I could always set up rsync or whatnot, but I do prefer the idea of running "professional" software, and I'd even be willing to spend money on it if it was any good. I just don't need to do this "in the cloud". (Or do I?)