CrashPlan is "unlimited" but it's not a storage service, it's a backup service. From what I understand, you have to use their client software, and that software will use RAM proportional to the total size of the data you're storing. In practice this puts a hard limit on the amount of data which is proportional to the amount of RAM you have.

So heavy users are not only capped, they're also subsidized by the light users.

I've got about 12TB on Crashplan, and the client's never used more than about 2GB. I doubt your "cap" applies in practice.

So about 170mb/TB if this scales linearly for some reason.

Some users were apparently bragging about having 1PB+ on ACD. That would mean the RAM usage would actually be a useful upper bound, as I doubt many of these guys have 170GB of RAM in their media server PCs.

In addition to the comment below about CrashPlan requiring you to use their client software, which limits abusabiliy -- I am also seeing signs of strain from CrashPlan. They have always had a policy that claimed they would delete data from machines that hadn't touched the service in a long time, but they had never implemented this in practice before; just last year they finally started sending out threatening letters to people saying they're going to delete data on short notice. (And they didn't really back down when people got angry.) This tells me the storage expense is starting to hurt them.

Yep, I cancelled my CrashPlan account when they pulled that. IIRC they gave me under a week to either download the data for 5-6 machines, or lose it forever.

> So how would you categorize CrashPlan? They offer unlimited storage for $60/year. I've had around 8TB backed up there for the last 2-3 years.

CrashPlan's upload speed is a joke for people located outside North America. I had an account for ~3 years, but found it difficult to upload more than 6TB. (There are rumours that CrashPlan throttles uploads.)

On the other hand, I've managed to backup most of my ~15TB NAS (and more) on Amazon Cloud Drive.

I'm in the UK and evaluated CrashPlan a couple of years ago - IIRC, it was so slow it was going to take several weeks to upload my 1TB of data.

Crashplan is a backup service. Different category of company.