Kinda impossible to do for Java. You need to reserve a heap that's large enough to handle your largest theoretical load, plus some extra for garbage collection bookkeeping. This can be grown dynamically, but I don't think the JVM ever shrinks the operating system allocated heap. Makes sense for server loads, isn't always a nice feature on client machines though.

-f0dder (July 31, 2015, 06:13 AM)

You're right, Java memory usage does tend to go up and to the right, but there has been some experimental efforts such as DeallocateHeapPages. A fellow coworker of mine was able to vastly reduce memory usage in a Java app he had written after profiling it to find the main problem points.

Thanks for the pointer to iDrive. I'm looking for an alternative to Crashplan.

I got the 4 year plan for the discount, with 2.9 TB on my machine and another 2 TB on my wife's, but I'm far from happy and the 4 years is nearly up. I'm not a fan of the excessive RAM use, but I really dislike how it starts the backup over from 0% after doing a version scan. It's taking forever on my 10Mbps upstream connection.

I also dislike how changing the backup set causes it to start over from scratch. A few weeks ago it was at around 95%, but after excluding my Chrome profile to speed things up, it started over and now I'm at 24%.

However, as you said, alternatives like BackBlaze aren't a viable option due to policies like only retaining deleted files for 30 days.

Using Amazon Glacier or Google Nearline is cost prohibitive, but they're getting there. I would love to see a service using Nearline with some deduplication and a lean client. I have nothing against Java per se, but CrashPlan clearly hasn't optimized their client for memory usage.

I'm thinking about trying iDrive but the discount expired and I know very little about them. For all of Crashplan's flaws, I was fairly confident they wouldn't be disappearing any time soon.

I've looked at SpiderOak's 5TB option for $279/year or $25/month. It's still pricey and not exclusively focused on backups, but the site says they store every version of your file.

I'd love to hear of other alternatives.