I had this problem before where CrashPlan (the backup service) software will seem to be stuck “analyzing” data over and over without actually backing it up.

The last time that happened I had found no way around it except to re-start the entire backup. And since it takes months to transfer 1.8TB of data, it wasn’t a decision I tool lightly. I had searched all over the web and tried everything I could find, but to no avail.

This time I did some more digging again, and found a solution that worked.

CrashPlan for me runs as a docker container under UnRAID and UnRAID is a virtual machine in my ESXi homelab. I had 4GB allocated to UnRAID to do what it needed to do. The memory usage (at least as reported by unRaid) was about 60-80% so I dind’t htink I was running out of memory, but seeing as no other solution was working this time either I made 2 changes.

• Increase the amount of ram that CrashPlan can use (as per this article)
• Gave UnRAID 4GB more ram for a total of 8GB.

Between those 2 tweaks, the next time the CrashPlan app started, it wet straight to actually transferring files instead of “analyzing” them.