For many years, CrashPlan offered its customers two optional (and extra-fee) services that were particularly useful for those with limited bandwidth. Seeding enabled users to load up an external hard drive with an initial full backup and send it to the company so that it would be unnecessary to wait weeks or months to have all of one’s data backed up to the cloud. Restore-to-Door was the opposite—a service whereby users could have files returned to them overnight on an external hard drive rather than wait for them to download.
I’m sorry to say that CrashPlan discontinued seeding in late 2015, and discontinued Restore-to-Door in January 2016. In both cases, a company rep told me the reason was that too few people used the services, and the company wanted to shift the responsible technician to working on other support tasks. This is bad news for people with limited bandwidth and a need for ultra-fast backup or restoration. Options for such people include switching to a competing service (such as Backblaze) or maintaining local backups in addition to cloud backups.