CrashPlan support policy

This article applies to all products.png

Overview

This policy document describes "Support Services," the procedures that CrashPlan follows to help our customers use our CrashPlan software. Our Support Services are divided into multiple subscription options ("support plans"). 

This document explains:

  • Which Support Services are included in each support plan
  • When and how you can contact our technical support team,
  • How we define the priority level of each issue
  • How you can escalate an issue

Support services

Each product includes a certain set of Support Services. This table explains which Support Services are included and which Support Services are not included for each product.

CrashPlan Enterprise customers have the option to upgrade to Premier Plus support, which offers additional benefits.

Support Service CrashPlan Essential, Professional, and Small Business Support CrashPlan Enterprise and MSPs Premier Support CrashPlan Enterprise Premier Plus Support
Access to self-service documentation Yes Yes Yes
Issue reporting options
  • Web
  • Chat
  • Web
  • Chat
  • Phone
    (800 number provided)
  • Web
  • Chat
  • Phone
    (800 number provided)
Administrators who can contact technical support* N/A** 4 10
Consultation for pre-planning and best practices No Yes Yes
Access to named Technical Account Manager (TAM) No No Yes

* Administrator must be recognized as an "administrative support contact" in the support system. To be registered as an administrative support contact, email your Customer Success Manager or create a ticket.
**CrashPlan Essential, Professional, and Small Business do not have administrative support contacts - any user on the account may contact support.

Contact hours and response times

Your support plan affects the times our technical support team is available to you and the speed of their response to your issues.

 

Support Service CrashPlan Essential, Professional, and Small Business Support CrashPlan Enterprise and MSPs Premier Support CrashPlan Enterprise Premier Plus Support

Support contact hours

  • Urgent priority issues:
    24 hours a day, 7 days a week*
  • All other issues:
    Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
    US Central Time (Minneapolis)
  • Urgent priority issues:
    24 hours a day, 7 days a week*
  • All other issues:
    Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
    US Central Time (Minneapolis)
Support contact hours on holidays
  • No Holiday availability
  • Urgent priority issues: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week***
  • All other issues:
    We respond to issues after the holiday.
  • Urgent priority issues: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week***
  • All other issues:
    We respond to issues after the holiday.
Response time for Urgent priority issues N/A 1 hour 30 minutes
Response time for High priority issues N/A 4 hours 4 hours
Response time for Normal priority issues N/A 1 business day 1 business day
Response time for Low priority issues N/A 3 business days 3 business days

*** 24/7 support is only available to CrashPlan Enterprise accounts with 50 or more seats.

Time zones

The time zones for these support contact hours vary depending on your location.

Your Location Time Zone For Support Contact Hours
USA US Central Time Zone
(UTC−05:00 or UTC−06:00, depending on daylight saving time)
Europe Western European Time Zone
(UTC±00:00)
Asia Western European Time Zone
(UTC±00:00)
Other locations US Central Time Zone
(UTC−05:00 or UTC−06:00, depending on daylight saving time)

Of course, support contact hours that are "24 hours a day, 7 days a week" are not affected by time zones.

Support on US holidays

Because fewer technical support resources are available on US holidays, we prioritize issues differently, depending on your support plan and the priority of your issue.

We observe US holidays from 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m., US Central Time, on the following dates:

US Holiday Date of Observance
New Year's Day January 1
Martin Luther King Jr. Day January 15
Presidents' Day Varies (third Monday in February)
Memorial Day Varies (last Monday in May)
Juneteenth June 19
Independence Day July 4
Labor Day Varies (first Monday in September)
Veterans Day November 11
Thanksgiving Day Varies (fourth Thursday in November)
Day after Thanksgiving Day Varies (Friday after Thanksgiving Day)
Christmas Day December 25

Your responsibility for response times

We expect you to help us to resolve your issue when we make a reasonable request for your help. If you do not answer our requests or provide assistance, we may be unable to respond to your issues according to these response times.

Contact Support

These guidelines show how to contact us for Support Services. Click your product name for more information.

CrashPlan Essential, Professional, and Small Business (Legacy)

Contact information

Contact method Hours

 

Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
US Central Time (Minneapolis)

 

Web support

Use our online ticketing system to submit a ticket or check the status of an existing ticket. To check an existing request, you must create an account.

To diagnose your issue as quickly as possible, include the following information in your request:

  • Product name (CrashPlan Essential, Professional, or Small Business)
  • Operating system and version
  • Computer ID (GUID) of affected devices
  • Logs from the Crashplan app
  • Email address (or username) of affected user accounts
  • Detailed description of the question or problem
  • Screenshots of relevant settings or error messages

Chat support

Click the Contact Support button anywhere on the support website to chat online with a technical support agent.

How we handle support requests

Our technical support agents actively monitor and triage incoming support requests. Tickets are addressed according to priority of the issue.

Technical support agents try to update tickets at least once every business day. Depending on the priority, responses may be made more frequently.

Support priority levels

Here is how our technical support agents determine priority when prioritizing support tickets:

Priority Level Description

Urgent

You cannot reasonably continue your work. You experience a complete loss of service and/or encounter one of the following scenarios:
  • Inability to restore from backup
  • Inability to renew your account
  • Account has expired

High

You experience a severe loss of service. Operations can continue in a restricted fashion, although long-term productivity might be adversely affected and there is no temporary workaround.

Normal

You experience a minor loss of service, which results in a partial, non-critical loss of functionality of the software. The impact is an inconvenience, which may require a workaround to restore functionality.

Low

You request information, report a documentation error, or a recommend a product improvement, but there is little to no impact on the operation of the software.

Automatic ticket closure

When a technical support agent provides a response to a submitted ticket, one of two changes occurs:

  • The ticket is marked Solved if the technical support agent provides a solution to the original issue.
    • After two days, the solved ticket is automatically marked as Closed. If you respond before the ticket is closed, the ticket is marked as Open for additional work with our technical support team.
    • If you reply to a closed ticket, our ticketing system creates a new follow-up ticket.
  • The ticket is marked Pending if the technical support agent requires additional input from you.
    • After four days, the pending ticket is automatically marked as Solved, as explained above.

When a ticket is marked as Solved, you receive an automated notification email.

Customer satisfaction survey

We send a customer satisfaction survey after a support ticket is closed. We appreciate your feedback! It helps us provide more effective support.

Support escalation

Occasionally, you may find that a support ticket must be escalated. We understand that your data is extremely important and access can be time-sensitive. You can request a ticket escalation by:

Include your ticket number, the reason for escalation, and the priority of the issue, as well as any added contact information that will help us serve you better.

A technical support manager reviews the request as quickly and efficiently as possible, evaluates the situation, and determines an appropriate action. This may require a direct conversation with the manager, or the support ticket may be reassigned to another technical support agent.

Supported versions

You must use the most recent version of the CrashPlan app. Your CrashPlan apps update automatically. For more information, refer to the supported version policy for CrashPlan for Small Business.

Your responsibilities

Use the identified support methods for requesting services and clearly explain the nature of the issue or request for help. When our technical support agents need you to assist in order to resolve the problem or complete your request, be available at the agreed-upon time.

File a bug

If you discover a behavior that may be a software bug, submit a support ticket to our technical support team. Include the steps taken to replicate the unexpected behavior.

If we identify the behavior as a bug, we will file an internal report. The resolution of the bug will depend on its priority and scope, as well as the current state of our development cycle.

CrashPlan Enterprise and MSPs

Contact information

The table below provides a quick summary of the contact information for our Support Services.

Support method Contact information
Web support

Submit a ticket or check ticket status 

You must register at https://gethelp.crashplan.com to create a case.  

Chat support

Chat now

You must register at https://gethelp.crashplan.com to initiate a chat.  

Email support

gethelp@crashplan.com

Universities and partners should instead use chat or create a case using https://gethelp.crashplan.com.

Call back support Sign in to https://gethelp.crashplan.com. Select Create a Ticket. From the "Reason for Ticket" dropdown, select Call Back.

How to report issues

Depending on your support plan, you can report issues to us though these three methods:

  • Web-based ticketing
  • Online chat
  • Phone

 Administrative support contact

To report issues, you must be recognized as an "administrative support contact" in the support system. To be registered as an administrative support contact, email your Customer Success Manager or create a ticket.

Web-based ticket 

You can use CrashPlan's web-based support ticket service to submit a ticket or check the status of an existing ticket.

Online chat

Click the Contact Support button anywhere on the support website to chat online with a technical support engineer.

Phone

Call CrashPlan for support if your issue is urgent, such as an issue that interferes with restoring files, prevents you from adopting a device, or critically affects a large number of users.

To find the phone number to call, sign in to https://gethelp.crashplan.com and refer to the Call Us box. Please have your registration key and email address on hand for identification purposes.

Exchange of information about support issues

Each time you report an issue, we exchange the following information with you:

  • We give you an identification number that is used to reference your specific issue in the future.
  • You should give us the following information in order to help us efficiently diagnose your issue:
    • Product name
    • Operating system and version
    • Software version of the CrashPlan app
    • Computer ID (GUID) of affected devices
    • Logs
    • Username (or email address) of affected user accounts
    • Detailed description of the question or problem
    • Screenshots of relevant settings or error messages

Definitions of issue priority

Each time you report an issue to us, we categorize it by the priority of the issue and the potential impact to you. These are the guidelines we use to categorize the priority of each issue:

Priority Level Description/Criteria
Urgent

The issue causes a complete loss of service and you cannot reasonably continue using the software in this state, or the issue affects your entire deployment.

 

CrashPlan expects you to be readily available 24/7 to drive a timely resolution to the issue.

 

Examples of urgent priority issues include:

  • Inability to restore across your deployment
  • Inability to back up or restore due to a licensing issue
  • An upgrade problem resulting in an outage
High

The issue causes a severe loss of service or affects the majority of your deployment. You can continue work in a limited capacity, but you may have an alternative method or workaround for the issue. The issue interferes with long-term use of the software.

 

Examples of high priority issues include:

  • Inability to restore from many devices
  • An installation issue
  • Severe performance degradation affecting your service
  • Inability to renew your account
  • An outage affecting a major portion of your deployment
Normal

The issue causes a minor loss of service or affects a small portion of your deployment. You can continue work despite an inconvenience or non-critical issue with the software.

 

Examples of normal priority issues include:

  • An issue affecting a single user
  • A problem with backup reports
  • A problem with file exclusions
  • A cosmetic issue with the CrashPlan app or CrashPlan console
Low

The issue causes little to no loss of service.

 

Examples of low priority issues include:

  • A request for additional information
  • A report of an error in the product documentation
  • A request for an additional feature or future improvement
  • Any issue on an unsupported version or unsupported configuration

Escalate an issue to another technical support engineer

After contacting us with a support issue, you can request that another technical support engineer handle your issue. Transferring the issue to another technical support engineer is called "escalation." When issues are escalated, they are usually (but not always) transferred to a technical support engineer who has more experience handling issues of that type.

Include the following information:

  • Your ticket number
  • The reason for escalation
  • The expected priority of the issue
  • Additional contact information, if necessary

How we respond to an escalation request

A  technical support manager:

  1. Evaluates your request as quickly and efficiently as possible
  2. Determines an appropriate action
  3. Communicates the decision to you

The manager may ask to have a direct conversation with you. Your issue may be transferred to another technical support engineer, depending on the manager's decision.

Other information about our support services

  • To receive these Support Services, you must have a current subscription agreement with CrashPlan or one of its authorized resellers.
  • Refer to your agreement with CrashPlan for any definitions or details that are not clearly specified in this document.
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