I'm been happily using CrashPlan for many years, and they now have announced that they are discontinuing their home plan, and force us to either upgrade to Small Business plan (which doubles the price), or to move out.

To be honest, I really liked their client and their backup servers.

I got about 80GB+ of personal photos, documents, musics all backed up to their server.
And I've used their file restore once when I accidentally screwed up my harddisk partitioning some time ago.
The backup and restore experience was very good.

I have about 5 more months to go before my plan expires.
So, I'd like to see if there are any good alternative that I can move on to, or grit my teeth and pay double the price for the same service...

I did some research online, and there are some good alternatives mentioned by others on the internet.
Each have their pros and cons.

I know that 80GB+ seems like a very small amount of data that can easily be backed up to free online storage like Google or Dropbox, but I don't really consider those "cloud drive" as a backup solution, because if you accidentally deleted the files from your folder, it gets "sync" to delete from the cloud drive as well.

Discuss?


UPDATE: I just realized, they gave me a 75% discount for the next year if I decide to migrate to their Small Business plan. So essentially, I still have 5 months + 1 year to find alternatives. Hooray...?

7 years ago*

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Which online backup service would you recommend?

View Results
CrashPlan
Carbonite
Backblaze
iDrive
Others (comment please)

Same situation here. Things to be aware of.

Many services will delete your files if you delete them from your drive. So accidentally delete something or have a program do something it should not and don't notice for 30 days. Its gone. No backup. Both Backblaze and Carbonite do this and its not something you can turn off. So both are out for me. I don't know about the other listed one. I have it bookmarked but have not looked into it yet.

Whats with the carbonite plan? If I look on the site it says unlimited. If I follow the link in the email it says only 250GB.

You want full private key encryption to happen on your side before it leaves your computer. You do not want the key stored on their side.

I had a whole list of requirements regarding version control, limits and various security features I want.. I'll have to dig that out and go over it. At the time Crashplan was the ONLY one that filled all my needs. I've been using it for 2.5 years and it will expire now in Jan. I have 4TB backed up with them. I'm not looking forward to switching.

7 years ago
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Yeah, I noticed the 30-days purging of deleted files on both Carbonite and Backblaze.
This is a very big deal-breaker for me. Because sometimes if you are hit by a malware (or worse, ransomware), you won't notice it until it is 30-days too late.

Well I guess we'll just have to deal with it. Pay double the price...
=(

7 years ago
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I just realized, they gave us a 75% discount for the next year if we decided to migrate to their Small Business plan. So essentially, next year our price will only be $30. Hooray?
:D

And also, I found out that iDrive is offering 90% discount for CrashPlan refugees.
https://www.idrive.com/idrive/signup/el/welcome90

$7 for the first year!

7 years ago*
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No recommendation from my side, but it's wrong that dropbox deletes files immediately from the cloud. It is possible that they are deleted after some time, I never checked that, but recently deleted files can be restored.
But i don't really use it as a backup, so there might be restriction i'm not actually aware of.

7 years ago
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Dropbox purge deleted files after 30-days (unless you pay extra $40 annually to extend into 1-year).
https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/data-retention-policy

At one glance, Dropbox seems like a good candidate for a backup solution for some people.
$100 per year for 1TB of storage, and on top of that, you get the cloud-drive feature.

The downside is, you will need to sacrifice a portion of your harddisk space to be marked as a dropbox sync folder, or meddle with symlink to add local folders into dropbox folder for it to sync.

And also I am already using Dropbox as a sync folder across my home laptop, work laptop, and gaming PC.

7 years ago*
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I've been looking around for a backup / cloud storage solution and pCloud seems like the best choice. It has file revisioning and recovery which are essential for backup. But even the Plus plan is limited to 2 TB at the moment. However, for continuous backup, that should be enough. For archives, where you need more space, you don't need continuous sync, just some off-site storage solution.

7 years ago
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Wow, now this I never heard before.
I went at Google a bit about them, all the reviews are good! And their pricing is crazy!

Thanks for sharing! I might just get their lifetime plan, just because why not.
xD

7 years ago
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That's what I use myself. The best feature IMHO is that you can sync any folder you wan and you can add as many folders as you want.Of course you can do this with other services using symlinks but it's nice it's a built-in feature.

7 years ago
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Manual backup to Google Drive is what I would use if I used such services. Mostly I just use an external hd. I guess I can understand some people wanting an automatic sync, it saves some trouble. I mostly don't remember to do manual backups very often :s

7 years ago
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I use tarsnap for work and SpiderOak at home. I used to use JungleDisk at home too and it was good last I was on it, but SpiderOak is free (for me at least, since I accumulated free space offers).

I also backup my media hdd (movies/music/manga/pictures/etc) to a drive on my home server.

7 years ago
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I've heard good things about SpiderOak.
But with their pricing... I would rather stay with CrashPlan.

Had a look at JungleDisk. They doesn't seem to offer personal plan.

7 years ago*
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I've been really happy with Backblaze. I use Cloudberry Backup with Backblaze B2, but their home plans are also good. If I had a bit more disposable income I'd go with Tresorit, they seem to be the best as far as encryption and security but they're quite pricey.

7 years ago
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Yeah, I should definitely check out BackBlaze.

Not a fan of B2 though, I'm too paranoid on not knowing how much to pay. I've heard too many horror story on cloud storage such as AWS S3.

Tresorit seems cool, but with that pricing... I'd rather stay in CrashPlan.
:S

7 years ago
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