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Popular Backup Solution CrashPlan Discontinuing Personal Subscriptions
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I'm really hoping the best for Backblaze as I recently signed up for a 2 year plan. It's been going well for me so far.
From what I've experienced with the new google backup, it does NOT version. It simply allows a one way or two way sync from any folder on your computer.
That explains why it's been reading that almost any backup will take weeks to complete. CrashPlan had worked well for me, and I'm not sure what I'll do in the future. But I'm glad I saw this posting.
I've been using CrashPlan for years, I don't recall who I was with before that, but they scrapped unlimited and wanted to charge a huge amount for the data I had stored, so I moved on.
I'm wondering now if I could just build/install a small(ish) waterproof enclosure somewhere in my yard, run a conduit out to it with power and data and just maintain and 'onsite/offsite' backup. I'm not all that bothered about access when I'm away from the house, just having a copy of my data that's safe should the unthinkable happen to the house!
I'm wondering now if I could just build/install a small(ish) waterproof enclosure somewhere in my yard, run a conduit out to it with power and data and just maintain and 'onsite/offsite' backup. I'm not all that bothered about access when I'm away from the house, just having a copy of my data that's safe should the unthinkable happen to the house!
Unless the safe is offsite, you run the risk of losing everything if it's stolen or something exceeds the damage limits of the safe (which would also cetainly exceed the limits of the Mac). Ideally you need to either be taking physical backups offsite regularly and without fail, or sending backups over the network (this could be with Arq to a variety of cloud services, encrypted before they leave your machine, or, say, from your NAS to a duplicate NAS kept at a relative's house - many NAS's have this capability built in).I use real hard drives (private/always available) and a fire proof safe. Got Carbon Copy Cloner?
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Take another look at Arq - it wasn't Arq charging it was Amazon Glacier - they now support a whole slew of backend storage services, you can pick your poison.
The fact that Arq had a bug that could have potentially deleted your whole backup is a little bit of a red flag for me. Do you have Arq? If so, what are your thoughts on that bug?
Jim Dalrymple's post today: BackBlaze instead of CrashPlan - (link: http://loopu.in/2wl9rT5) loopu.in/2wl9rT5
Works out to the following, per-month . . .
Wasabi — $0.0039/GB
Amazon Drive — $0.0050/GB
B2 — $0.0050/GB
OneDrive — $0.0058/GB
Google Cloud Storage — $0.0070/GB
Google Drive — $0.0100/GB
Dropbox — $0.0100/GB
Amazon S3 — $0.0135/GB
Of course, price is only one part of the picture, but that's just price, apples-to-apples.
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Damn, this really sucks. Their family plan, at $150/year for up to 10 computers was an unbelievable deal. Hell, you could use the family plan even with small business - as it would back up server OS' and even virtual machines. Personally I think Carbonite sucks - as their basic $60/year solution is completely inadequate for a lot of uses (won't backup external or network drives, won't backup files over 4GB, etc). To get a useful back up solution you need at least their plus service which is $99/year (currently discounted to $75/year). If you are doing anything with a server OS, you need their absurdly expensive Carbonite for Office Power plan, which is $600/year for unlimited computers - but only includes 500GB of storage!
In any case, I would recommend Backblaze as the best alternative. I've only heard good things about them - and their pricing is very competitive ($50/year/computer for unlimited storage). I probably would have chosen Backblaze years ago if I only need 1 or 2 computers backed up - but like I said the Crashplan Family plan just couldn't be beat.
In any case, I would recommend Backblaze as the best alternative. I've only heard good things about them - and their pricing is very competitive ($50/year/computer for unlimited storage). I probably would have chosen Backblaze years ago if I only need 1 or 2 computers backed up - but like I said the Crashplan Family plan just couldn't be beat.
https://www.arqbackup.com/blog/arq-5-8-5-for-mac-fixes-a-bad-bug/
Here was the devs blog post on this. Stuff happens I guess, and it appears to me he was pretty up front about it and has taken steps to make sure it does not happen again.
I JUST switched from Carbonite to Crashplan on August 11th after over 7 years with Carbonite. Since I was in contact with customer service before committing to paying for Crashplan, I feel like I got a bait & switch. I considered asking for my funds back, but I'm planning to stick around for a bit based on the following (hope this helps someone):
1) Since I just signed up, the 2 month extension being given to home customers brings me to October, 2018. I can switch right now to the business plan.
2) In October, 2018, I'll be given 75% off for 12 months. That brings me to October 2019 for an additional $30 total. (Essentially, I'm getting 2 years and 2 months on Crashplan small business for $90.)
3) As mentioned above, I have been with Carbonite for 7 years or so. Until a few years ago, I had a Mac pro with my drives INTERNAL. Now that I'm on a MBP, my drives are external, meaning NONE of them are covered on the $60 plan. So, I'm penalized because I use a laptop. I'm now on a $60 plan for a single 256GB internal drive that used to cover my 4TBs of internal drives. I explained this issue to Carbonite.
4) Despite the above, I initially switched to the $100 Carbonite plan so that external data would be covered. Taking into consideration the 2 month extension for early renewal every year at Carbonite and that I preferred Carbonite's interface, I didn't find the price difference discouraging. Additionally, I read that Carbonite had faster speed transfers. However, I quickly found out that the extra $40 only allowed me only ONE external drive (wasn't clear from the email advertisement)...yes, ONE!
5) I figured I would try just doing one drive external since the speed was supposedly faster and, again, I liked the GUI more. However, I found that the speed was NOT noticeably faster than Crashplan. (I was been running both - Crashplan on the demo).
6) I realized that, not only could Carbonite only handle ONE external drive, but it could only handle ONE partition on the ONE external drive! I confirmed this with online support. They suggested moving everything to a single partition!
7) I did try a Backblaze trial a month or so ago. I can't remember why I cancelled before the trial even expired, but I think it was a mix of transfer speed, the interface and online reviews specific to Backblaze.
Bottom line on customer service...
I feel that Carbonite was misleading with the ad and made me jump through hoops as a customer to figure out that they were unable to support my needs. It is ridiculous that $60 covered 4TB of data when the drives were internal, but now only 256MB because I switched to a laptop and my data is external. I find an additional $40 for ONE partition on ONE external drive ludicrous.
As of today, I also feel that Crashplan was not up front since they let me sign up for a service that I can't imagine they didn't know would be eliminated just 11 days ago. However, I also receive the benefit 14 months (minus 11 days) followed by another year on it for $30.
The transition was pretty much seamless. You'll need to get Crashplan pro on your iPhone, but the MacOS app switches over itself.
COST:
So, after October, 2019, I'll be at $120/year for unlimited drives whereas I signed up for $60/year. Essentially, the cost doubled. I don't know where Backblaze will be at that point with their plans. I also don't know that Crashplan wouldn't raise prices at some point. (Interestingly, I asked online support if prices would be raised (blanket statement, not even a time limit) and was told that they wouldn't.)
1) Since I just signed up, the 2 month extension being given to home customers brings me to October, 2018. I can switch right now to the business plan.
2) In October, 2018, I'll be given 75% off for 12 months. That brings me to October 2019 for an additional $30 total. (Essentially, I'm getting 2 years and 2 months on Crashplan small business for $90.)
3) As mentioned above, I have been with Carbonite for 7 years or so. Until a few years ago, I had a Mac pro with my drives INTERNAL. Now that I'm on a MBP, my drives are external, meaning NONE of them are covered on the $60 plan. So, I'm penalized because I use a laptop. I'm now on a $60 plan for a single 256GB internal drive that used to cover my 4TBs of internal drives. I explained this issue to Carbonite.
4) Despite the above, I initially switched to the $100 Carbonite plan so that external data would be covered. Taking into consideration the 2 month extension for early renewal every year at Carbonite and that I preferred Carbonite's interface, I didn't find the price difference discouraging. Additionally, I read that Carbonite had faster speed transfers. However, I quickly found out that the extra $40 only allowed me only ONE external drive (wasn't clear from the email advertisement)...yes, ONE!
5) I figured I would try just doing one drive external since the speed was supposedly faster and, again, I liked the GUI more. However, I found that the speed was NOT noticeably faster than Crashplan. (I was been running both - Crashplan on the demo).
6) I realized that, not only could Carbonite only handle ONE external drive, but it could only handle ONE partition on the ONE external drive! I confirmed this with online support. They suggested moving everything to a single partition!
7) I did try a Backblaze trial a month or so ago. I can't remember why I cancelled before the trial even expired, but I think it was a mix of transfer speed, the interface and online reviews specific to Backblaze.
Bottom line on customer service...
I feel that Carbonite was misleading with the ad and made me jump through hoops as a customer to figure out that they were unable to support my needs. It is ridiculous that $60 covered 4TB of data when the drives were internal, but now only 256MB because I switched to a laptop and my data is external. I find an additional $40 for ONE partition on ONE external drive ludicrous.
As of today, I also feel that Crashplan was not up front since they let me sign up for a service that I can't imagine they didn't know would be eliminated just 11 days ago. However, I also receive the benefit 14 months (minus 11 days) followed by another year on it for $30.
The transition was pretty much seamless. You'll need to get Crashplan pro on your iPhone, but the MacOS app switches over itself.
COST:
So, after October, 2019, I'll be at $120/year for unlimited drives whereas I signed up for $60/year. Essentially, the cost doubled. I don't know where Backblaze will be at that point with their plans. I also don't know that Crashplan wouldn't raise prices at some point. (Interestingly, I asked online support if prices would be raised (blanket statement, not even a time limit) and was told that they wouldn't.)
Hah, some crash plan!
As for me, I have a small 4TB RAID 0 drive that I backup using CCC to a desktop 4TB drive. My little RAID 0 drive has been acting weird though so I'd like to replace it with an SSD at some point, but that's ridiculously expensive. All my important photos, docs, etc are in Dropbox, and then I have iCloud photo storage.
As for me, I have a small 4TB RAID 0 drive that I backup using CCC to a desktop 4TB drive. My little RAID 0 drive has been acting weird though so I'd like to replace it with an SSD at some point, but that's ridiculously expensive. All my important photos, docs, etc are in Dropbox, and then I have iCloud photo storage.
I've used Crashplan for many years because I've got 4-5 computers to back up, space was unlimited, cost was cheap (although its gone up a whole lot and they stopped multi-year renewals), and they offered restore HDDs (since dropped).
I could go with Arq plus perhaps B2 which looks the most cost effective but I don't understand the multiple computer licensing.
But it looks like my best bet is Backblaze just running on my server and then locally backing up the other computers to it using Chronosync, which I've already licensed. One downside is that it doesn't save old versions after a month, but it appears that Chronosync will do that.
At any rate it's not my sole offsite backup. I've got lots of redundancy.
I could go with Arq plus perhaps B2 which looks the most cost effective but I don't understand the multiple computer licensing.
But it looks like my best bet is Backblaze just running on my server and then locally backing up the other computers to it using Chronosync, which I've already licensed. One downside is that it doesn't save old versions after a month, but it appears that Chronosync will do that.
At any rate it's not my sole offsite backup. I've got lots of redundancy.
I am beginning to question my own wisdom when it comes to these cloud backup services. A 4-year subscription was $199 when I signed up 5 years ago. That was for an unlimited number of devices and unlimited storage. Sure, I knew it was a pricing model that probably could not endure; I just never expected to be facing such massive price hikes to stay with this service. I currently back up seven family devices - that's $840 per year under their standard go-forward pricing. I'm not seeing much that is significantly better (at least not with a comparable feature set) for the number of devices and amount of data my family backs up.
Last year I added a Synology Diskstation to my home storage and backup strategy. It has plenty of terra-bytes and has performed flawlessly so far. I back up local devices to it and another external drive. That gives me two local back-ups plus CrashPlan. For $840 I can just about add a second DiskStation configured the same way and locate it offsite with one of my daughters. That would leave me with four copies of my data, one of them off site, and no expensive ongoing cloud fees. Maybe I lose the raised-floor data center that CrashPlan gives me, but who knows how safe that is anyway. I don't know their partners and have never seen their facilities. I sometimes wonder how oversold the security, reliability, and redundancy of these consumer services must be. They know that no consumer is ever going to walk in and ask to audit their continuity or recovery plans. Perhaps they are "good enough," but does that make them worth the price? I'm not so sure anymore. For a home solution, I think I could be just fine saying "so long" when my current plan expires.
Last year I added a Synology Diskstation to my home storage and backup strategy. It has plenty of terra-bytes and has performed flawlessly so far. I back up local devices to it and another external drive. That gives me two local back-ups plus CrashPlan. For $840 I can just about add a second DiskStation configured the same way and locate it offsite with one of my daughters. That would leave me with four copies of my data, one of them off site, and no expensive ongoing cloud fees. Maybe I lose the raised-floor data center that CrashPlan gives me, but who knows how safe that is anyway. I don't know their partners and have never seen their facilities. I sometimes wonder how oversold the security, reliability, and redundancy of these consumer services must be. They know that no consumer is ever going to walk in and ask to audit their continuity or recovery plans. Perhaps they are "good enough," but does that make them worth the price? I'm not so sure anymore. For a home solution, I think I could be just fine saying "so long" when my current plan expires.
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How about a cloud service to back up just the Diskstation? It's just one computer.
Yes, I have Arq. I've been using it quite happily/successfully for just under six years, including recovering some files from it. Yes, the bug could possibly have deleted my backups. It didn't. Bugs happen. The developer fixed it and had been pretty up-front about everything. And, to be clear, if it deleted my whole backup, most of what I would have lost is time/bandwidth spent uploading - my primary backups are to Time Machine, in-house (having only one form of backup is foolish, as they say, "Two is one and one is none"). Arq is there in case the house gets hit by a meteor.
The big win for Arq (aside from it being time-tested) is that it's a backend-agnostic backup tool (that encrypts with your chosen key before it leaves your machine). The developer is motivated to make a great backup tool, period; he's not selling anyone's backup service, so he isn't imposing limits (e.g. "no backups of external drives", rate limiting, etc.) that are in the favor of someone selling a "complete solution" rather than in the customer's favor (in the "complete solution" scenario, the CEO is balancing desirability of the product against how much storage/bandwidth each customer uses and how much money they get from each customer - this can lead to decisions that are better for the company's bottom line at the expense of the user).
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I haven't played with it much, but it seems to be versioning for me, albeit only for 30 days. It says I have 89 versions of this file, for example:
A relative recently got a Synology Diskstation (after his wife had to spend $$$ for data recovery because her drive went south and her backups weren't recent), and it has (if I'm remembering the details right, second-hand) a pretty simple-to-configure ability to automatically back itself up to one or more cloud services.
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Highly worth considering - I suspect the two Synology units may already be able to handle this (i.e. set the right configuration parameters rather than having to cobble something together). Primary concerns are taking measures to ensure that the remote unit is absolutely do-not-touch (by kids/visitors/pets/etc.), and having some sort of good error reporting hooked up, so if the offsite backups start failing, you find out about it promptly (that is, you need to have the local unit actively tell you that the backup failed, not have to rely on you noticing that some backup report hasn't come in recently).
Crashplan was the slowest service i ever used. Would take about 9months to backup my data, because they cap speed at 1mbps on average.
[doublepost=1503445225][/doublepost]Unfortunatly an end-to-end encrypted backup provider with payable ~5tb of backup space thats also decently fast doesnt exist. Amazon drive+arq was good but amazon stopped.
[doublepost=1503445225][/doublepost]Unfortunatly an end-to-end encrypted backup provider with payable ~5tb of backup space thats also decently fast doesnt exist. Amazon drive+arq was good but amazon stopped.
There are ways to speed it up. My upload of 1.1TB basically maxed my 10Mbit up connection the whole time. Maybe took an extra day, but overall I was pleased.
I tried suggestions but nothing really worked. I have a 150mbps connection. I lived livedrive but they store their own keys and give them away like christmas presents when asked.