Overview
CrashPlan app users are sometimes confused by the fact that the backup rate they see from the CrashPlan app is significantly different from the bandwidth they receive from their Internet Service Provider (ISP). The purpose of this article is to explain how the CrashPlan app's effective transfer rate differs from the bandwidth provided by your ISP, as well as some of the factors outside of CrashPlan's control that can affect backup rates.
Before you begin
Review How CrashPlan backup works.
Network considerations
- CrashPlan cloud environments share bandwidth when backing up. As a result, upload speeds may not match maximum speeds of an individual’s Internet provider.
- CrashPlan monitors usage across our data centers and strategically adds capacity (servers, storage and bandwidth) to our infrastructure to deliver the best upload speeds we can.
Why backup speed and bandwidth differ
Another factor that causes the backup speed to differ from the network bandwidth and throughput is that the CrashPlan app compresses the data before sending it (unless this default settings is changed). This usually results in the effective transfer rate being higher than the actual transfer rate. For example: CrashPlan app user Susan has 10 GB of data on her system to be backed up. After the CrashPlan app compresses and encrypts the data, it now takes up only 8 GB of space. Her CrashPlan app transfers that 8 GB of data at an actual transfer rate of 1 Mbps. However, the effective transfer rate is actually 1.25 Mbps, or 25 percent higher, due to the data compression.
The backup speed is not the same thing as bandwidth or throughput:
- Bandwidth is a theoretical maximum, and applies only to your connection to your ISP, not the Internet in general.
- Actual throughput or file transfer speed is the performance that your device sees in actual operation.
- Backup speed and effective transfer rate depend on both of the above, and also on data compression and other factors, as described below.
Upload versus download speeds
What you can expect
CrashPlan app users can expect to back up about 10 GB of information per day on average if the user's computer is powered on and not in standby mode. The CrashPlan cloud is a shared service, which means that upload and download speeds depend on the number of users connected at any given point. The CrashPlan app estimates the total time it will take to upload your data based on your current network speeds. The time remaining appears on the Home screen. This estimation will vary over the duration of your first backup.
If you are consistently reaching speeds of 1 Mbps or higher but you have a large backup selection, configure the CrashPlan app further to optimize your backup.
Our goal is to provide secure and reliable backup. We work like other services that share resources with a pool of users, individual speeds vary depending on the number of simultaneous users and how much they are uploading at one time. We do not throttle your backup or restores. We also do not limit file sizes.