CrashPlan Cloud Backups

I just bought a one-year subscription to CrashPlan, a cloud backup service. I am in the process of backing up 145 GB of data to their servers, which the desktop client estimates will take about 2 weeks at my current speeds.

I have used Mozy for years, ever since my brother had a massive hard drive crash and I realized that I didn’t have a good backup plan for my own data. At the time, the only real options for online backup were Mozy and Carbonite, and Mozy was a much better product. Unfortunately, over the years they have changed their plans to make it more expensive without any obvious improvements to the service to justify the price increase. When I first started using Mozy, you could back up an unlimited amount of data to their servers. Now, I have to pay extra for the 125 GB of storage they are willing to give me.

I have been hovering just below the limit for a while, purposely excluding some data so I don’t go over and have to pay even more per month. So I finally decided to look around for an alternative and found two solid options: CrashPlan and BackBlaze.  Both have excellent reviews online and it seems like you could flip a coin between them and end up with a great backup service. Both have unlimited data backups, encrypted transport, encrypted storage, and a bunch of other nice features.  And both are around $5 per month, depending on your payment plan.

My main reason for choosing CrashPlan was because it stores unlimited versions of  your files (BackBlaze only stores versions for 30 days) and some reviews said that the CrashPlan software had more advanced options.