Code42 decided to terminate their "CrashPlan for Home" service. This means that after the shutdown date of October 22, 2018, CrashPlan will delete your backup on their servers, which is to be expected, but much more annoyingly, you will no longer be able to restore CrashPlan backups that you stored locally. Effectively, Code42 is reaching into your computer to break your backups for you.
This is unacceptable to me because I'd lose the revision history for my files. Even if I was to restore a complete copy of the newest revision of my CrashPlan archive now, if I later discover that the most recent version of one of my files was corrupted, I wouldn't be able to roll that file back to a previous revision. To prevent this I'd have to somehow restore every revision of every file from my CrashPlan archive before the shutdown, which is not feasible.
I created Plan C to solve this issue. Plan C will be able to restore files from your locally-stored CrashPlan Home backup even after the shutdown date.
Code42 is able to break your backups remotely because their servers hold your backup decryption key in escrow. When you log in to your account using the CrashPlan Home client, this key is downloaded to your computer and stored in an encrypted form in CrashPlan's "adb" (authentication database) directory.
After the shutdown date, you will no longer be able to log in to your account, so you will no longer be able to download this key. It's possible that the CrashPlan client will erase the key automatically on this date.
So you should immediately make a backup copy of your adb directory to preserve the key. First stop the CrashPlan daemon so it releases its lock on the directory:
Windows - net stop CrashPlanService
macOS - sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
Linux - sudo service crashplan stop
Other - https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Troubleshooting/Stop_and_start_the_Code42_app_service
Now copy the adb directory somewhere safe, here's where to find it:
Windows - C:\ProgramData\CrashPlan\conf\adb or C:\Users\<username>\AppData\<Local or Roaming>\CrashPlan\conf\adb
macOS - /Library/Application Support/CrashPlan/conf/adb or ~/Library/Application Support/CrashPlan/conf/adb
Linux - /usr/local/crashplan/conf/adb
On Windows, files in the conf directory are owned by SYSTEM, so a regular user can't open or copy them without first taking ownership of them.
The adb directory should contain a list of files similar to this:
000630.ldb
000632.ldb
000637.log
CURRENT
LOCK
LOG
MANIFEST-000636
It may also be useful to save CrashPlan's other files such as the service.model file. It's not clear what the values
in this serialised Java object are good for, but it might come in useful for restoring backups later.
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Plan C is only supported on POSIX environments like macOS and Linux. Backups of Windows computers can be restored, but Plan C itself cannot run on Windows.
Plan C has only been tested with backups maintained with CrashPlan 4.8. Older databases may use legacy features that Plan C does not support.
Plan C supports restoring from backup archives where the backup target was a Computer or Folder. Backups sent to Friends probably have additional encryption that I have not examined.
It doesn't support backups encrypted with a "custom key", but could probably be extended to do so.
It doesn't support restoring device files (sockets, etc.) or file resource forks (Mac, Windows).
It doesn't support restoring file metadata like permissions and modification times.
First use Plan C to recover your decryption key. Because of the potential for Plan C to inadvertently corrupt the adb database, it is best to point it to a copy of the adb directory:
plan-c --adb path/to/your/adb-copy/ recover-key The output should look like:
Here's your recovered decryption key (for use with --key):
47F28C8B159B44979F420A7721C3104F...
Now you can use that key with the --key argument to decrypt your backup with the other commands.
Options:
--adb arg path to CrashPlan's 'adb' directory to recover a
decryption key from (e.g. /Library/Application
Support/CrashPlan/conf/adb. Optional)
--key arg your backup decryption key (Hexadecimal, not your
password. Optional)
--archive arg the root of your CrashPlan backup archive
--command arg command to run (recover-key,list,restore,etc)
Which archived files to operate on:
--prefix arg prefix of the archived filepath to operate on
--filename arg exact archived filepath to operate on
--include-deleted include deleted files
--at arg restore/list files at the given date (yyyy-mm-dd
hh:mm:ss), if omitted will use the newest version
Restore options:
--dest arg destination directory for restored files
--dry-run verify integrity of restored files without actually
writing them to disk. Filenames are printed to stdout
and errors to stderr.
Commands:
recover-key - Recover your backup encryption key from a CrashPlan ADB directory
list - List all filenames that were ever in the backup (incl deleted)
list-detailed - List the newest version of files in the backup (add --at for other times)
list-all - List all versions of the files in the backup
restore - Restore files
Use one of the list commands to list the contents of a CrashPlan Home backup archive.
The list command lists all the filenames contained in the archive, including deleted ones:
./plan-c --key 47F28C8B159... --archive crashplan-backup/29268951613 list
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.cpp
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.h
/Users/dave/Documents/Todo list.txt
/Users/dave/Documents/Vacation plans.txtThe list-detailed command shows detailed information about the latest revision of the files in the archive:
./plan-c --key 47F28C8B159... --archive crashplan-backup/29268951613 list-detailed
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c 0 2018-03-11 12:30:20 5D8C0210C2D84CABB3CEC8ADDE17EBF4
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.cpp 22419 2018-03-11 12:35:33 7E26B42E73834CE1AD4B872E7F23CCA5
...From left to right, the columns are the filename, the filesize (0 for directories), the time that Crashplan snapshotted
the file, and the MD5 hash of the file (- for directories).
You can add --include-deleted to include files that no longer existed in the newest version of the backup, these are
listed with an X for their MD5 hash.
Add the --at option to show information about files in an earlier version of the backup.
list-all lists every revision that Crashplan has stored for the files.
./plan-c --key 47F28C8B159... --archive crashplan-backup/29268951613 list-all
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c 0 2015-05-24 02:28:09 -
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c 0 2015-06-16 05:32:26 -
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c 0 2017-09-14 08:11:11 -
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.cpp 3964 2015-05-24 02:28:09 7E26B42E73834CE1AD4B872E7F23CCA5
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.cpp 3964 2015-06-16 05:32:24 7E26B42E73834CE1AD4B872E7F23CCA5
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.cpp 4019 2015-07-09 06:27:50 4AAE0EB528F04082B4D5DC7B59F34EA7
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.cpp 4019 2015-07-09 21:35:09 4AAE0EB528F04082B4D5DC7B59F34EA7
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.cpp 0 2015-09-04 15:15:08 X
/Users/dave/workspace/plan-c/planc.cpp 4144 2017-09-14 08:11:10 4CE7888DB7CA449FA729B4114B157336
...You can pass a --prefix to list or restore only files whose full path starts with a given string, e.g.:
./plan-c --key ... --archive ... --prefix /Users/dave/Documents/ list
/Users/dave/Documents/Todo list.txt
/Users/dave/Documents/Vacation plans.txt
...The prefix does not pay attention to path separators, --prefix hello will find hello polly.txt and helloworld.txt.
To list/restore a single file, use the --filename option instead.
By default, the restore command will restore the newest revision of every file to the destination directory.
Use the --dest argument to choose the directory where the restored files will be saved to. If the original file path was
/Users/dave/file.txt and you set the destination to ./recovered then the file will be restored to
./recovered/Users/dave/file.txt.
Use --at to restore an earlier snapshot of the archive.
You can use --prefix and --filename to limit the files that will be restored.
If you don't want to use one of the precompiled releases from the Releases tab above, you can build Plan C yourself. You
need a C++ compiler, make and cmake installed (e.g. apt install build-essential make cmake on Ubuntu Xenial).
Clone this repository, then run this command to fetch the required libraries:
git submodule update --initThen run make, and all of the libraries will be built, followed by Plan C itself.