Speed up your backup

Updated April 21, 2026 15:08

Overview

Designed to make minimal demands on your computer's resources, the CrashPlan app default settings favor quiet, background operation over outright speed. However, during your initial backup or after adding a large number of files to your backup selection, you may decide speed is more important.

This article outlines some of the factors affecting backup speed and some temporary adjustments to help backup complete more quickly, as well as some items to consider before changing any settings.

Considerations

Even under ideal conditions, the initial upload process can take a while. Backup times may range anywhere from a few days to a month or more, depending on your upload speed and the total size of the files you have selected to back up.
The adjustments described here are meant to be temporary. Once the backup is completed, the CrashPlan app only uploads the changes made to files, so you can return to the default backup settings and allow the CrashPlan app to back up continuously and quietly. See How CrashPlan backup works for more information.
Results of changing settings may not be immediately apparent. You may need to wait a day or so before noticing improvements.

Factors affecting backup speed

The CrashPlan app does more behind the scenes during backup than simply transfer your files. The CrashPlan app de-duplicates, analyzes, compresses, and encrypts your data before sending it to your backup destinations. By taking these steps before sending your data to your backup destinations, the CrashPlan app:

Decreases file size, increasing your effective transfer rate, which makes both backing up and restoring files faster.
Reduces the amount of storage space needed at the destination.
Ensures your data is secure at all stages of the process, even during transmission.

Additional factors can affect backup speed, including your individual hardware and network components and configuration. For more information, see Backup speed does not match available bandwidth.

Steps

If upload speeds are slower than you expect, adjust the default CrashPlan app settings that prevent it from using too many system resources. Changing these settings increases the system resources available to the CrashPlan app to help speed up your backup.

Try the suggestions in order
Explore the options below in the order presented. If you see adequate improvement in speed after one or two changes, avoid making additional changes.

Step 1: Increase performance settings

Open the CrashPlan app.
Select Settings.
Select Usage.
Set the performance limits to 100%.

Step 2: Set backup to "always"

Open the CrashPlan app.
Select Settings.
Select Backup Sets.
Set the Backup Schedule to Always keep up to date.

app settings backup set to always run.png

Step 3: Update network settings

Open the CrashPlan app.
Select Settings.
Select Network.
Set the WAN and LAN transfer limits to None.

Bandwidth_settings_in_network_tab_6.8.3.png

Step 4: Increase the time between backups

The CrashPlan app prioritizes backing up recently changed or created files first, to ensure that any new data is protected. However, if you create or edit many files on a regular basis, backing up this new data can delay the backup of older files or larger files.

To promote backup of old files, reduce the frequency for new versions of new files. This trade off can be beneficial until your backup is complete.

Sign in to the CrashPlan console.
Choose Devices.
Click on the name of your device.
Select the action menu .
Click Edit.
Select the Backup tab.
Navigate to Frequency and Versions.
Move the slider to change the Backup changes every interval to a longer period, such as Every 8 hours or Every day.
Click Save.

Step 5: Add exclusions

If you are not already using the list of Files excluded from backup by default in CrashPlan, updating your list to include those files will likely speed up backups by excluding files CrashPlan is not designed to focus on backing up.

If you would like to add additional files to be excluded from backup, this article has the steps on how to do so: Include and exclude files for backup from CrashPlan.

Step 6: Prevent your computer from sleeping

The CrashPlan app can only back up when your computer is awake. If you put your computer into sleep mode regularly or if it is configured to go to sleep under certain conditions, this can delay the progress of larger backup jobs.

Disable your computer's default sleep settings to allow the CrashPlan app to run uninterrupted and complete the backup more quickly.