Let’s put on a little play, in one act. To set the scene you need to know that my employers use a service called Backup Radar to track successes and failures across our suite of supported backup products. Backup Radar uses APIs to connect to some services and relies on emailed reports for others. CrashPlan is one of those others.
Until recently, CrashPlan has sent a daily summary report of successes and failures all in one message. Nice, simple, all in one place, easy to parse. Then they decided to change report formats…
Me, to CrashPlan Support: Hey, guys. I noticed the new report format. Looks snazzy, but could you re-enable reporting successful jobs? This is important to us.
CrashPlan Support: LOL No.
Me, to CPS: Do you have an API we could query instead?
CPS: Um what?
Me, to CPS: Any options at all to remedy this problem? It’s serious enough that we’re going to look at replacing your product in our offerings.
CPS: We only look forward, never back.
Me, to Backup Radar Support: Looks like CrashPlan have utterly crippled our ability to use their centralized daily summary report to track successful jobs. Got any suggestions?
Backup Radar Support: Here’s an article on how to configure the CrashPlan clients individually to send their daily reports, bypassing the useless centralized reporting situation.
Me: Well, okay. That’ll be tedious, but whatever works, thanks!
CrashPlan: Oh hey, we just updated the UI for all clients to remove the email reporting option. LOL!
Me: …sigh.
Hey, remember when CrashPlan didn’t suck? I used their services for years! I pushed for us to adopt them as the replacement for Ahsay!
Argh.
