Backup Archive / CrashPlan / Carbonite?

[TDF]

Hey all,



I am a musician and content creator with years of video, photo and music content. Some of my Photos Libraries are as big as 450GB and I have multiple others that are around 200GB. I am looking to add a cloud based storage incase I do get a lightning strike or power surge or experience hard drive failure. Currently I am using Time Machine on two separate external drives.



Do any of you have suggestions for the right cloud based archive for me? I've been reading into CrashPlan / Carbonite. Will one of these services work to backup and protect several TB of video / photo / music content? iCloud simply does not have the amount of storage that I require. There has got to be other content creators like me who are using such services to keep all of their content safe.



Thanks for your help

 

[Weaselboy]

Some of us here are using the app Arq to backup to cloud services. I'm using it to backup to Amazon's S3 servers. Checkout a long thread on Arq and in particular @SteveJobzniak 's posts starting here where he is using Arq with Backblaze B2 service.

Might be a good option for you.

 

[HenryAZ]

I am scared of clouds, or more specifically their availability when I really need it. I do the old fashioned method of making off site backups. I have a pair of 4TB HGST drives that rotate every month into and out of my safe deposit box. Each one is bootable, a partition that is a clone of my boot drive, and two other partitions have all of my data. More frequent backups and incremental backups are kept on site.

 

[simonsi]

Yep just rotate your TM drives offsite to cover you, much simpler/faster than a cloud solution and consider how long it would take to download everything IF your worst-case scenario happened - after all the whole point of a backup is the restore, not the backup itself.

I have a TM drive at home and another at the office, effortless offsite backup by that route.

 

[MrGimper]

Crashplan have just announced that they are stopping providing services for home users, so this thread may become more important going forwards.... I'm already looking around as I have a Home Family sub with CrashPlan
[doublepost=1503418550][/doublepost]Crashplan are offering to migrate users to small business. The deal is free until the end of your sub, and then 75% off per computer for the next 12 months. Each computer is normally $10 so thats $2.50 per computer for 12 months. I've just moved my 5 machines over so I get another 12 months to worry about where I go instead

The process is very painless and took about 5 minutes.

 

[DominikHoffmann]

The cloud backup naysaying aside, what are the affordable, reliable alternatives to CrashPlan? Right now, with CrashPlan for Home I pay $14/mo for backing up 8 computers with a total of 6 TB of backed up data. With CrashPlan for Business this would cost me $80/mo, after the 75%-off deal expires in 12 months. Their other alternative, which is Carbonite is $75/y per computer, which would amount to $50/mo in my case. Both options are significant increases in cost.

 

[MrGimper]

The cloud backup naysaying aside, what are the affordable, reliable alternatives to CrashPlan? Right now, with CrashPlan for Home I pay $14/mo for backing up 8 computers with a total of 6 TB of backed up data. With CrashPlan for Business this would cost me $80/mo, after the 75%-off deal expires in 12 months. Their other alternative, which is Carbonite is $75/y per computer, which would amount to $50/mo in my case. Both options are significant increases in cost.

I looked at LiveDrive, IDrive and BackBlaze. I have 5 computers backing up and was paying $13.99 p/m for the home family sub. The more annoying thing is that the Small Business offering doesn't support the computer-to-computer backup facility that home did.

Edit: I migrated to small business for the 75% offer and to give me 12 months to worry about moving.

 

[dimme]

I am also looking to move from crashplan soon, I like the features of idrive but also see people complaining about them. I not sure if the complaints are just frustration that users had in setting up the service. They seem to be the only ones that offer a hard drive for the first backup seed.

 

[nickditoro]

Crashplan have just announced that they are stopping providing services for home users, so this thread may become more important going forwards.... I'm already looking around as I have a Home Family sub with CrashPlan
[doublepost=1503418550][/doublepost]Crashplan are offering to migrate users to small business. The deal is free until the end of your sub, and then 75% off per computer for the next 12 months. Each computer is normally $10 so thats $2.50 per computer for 12 months. I've just moved my 5 machines over so I get another 12 months to worry about where I go instead

The process is very painless and took about 5 minutes.

I'm a Crashplan home user whose subscription doesn't end until September 2018, so I will consider their offer to move to a business account (I back up only one computer, but multiple internal and connected drives with nearly 8TB of files). Alternatively, Crashplan announced an exclusive partnership with Carbonite to "make your transition to Carbonite quick and easy." Carbonite home-user prices are competitive.

 

[admwright]

Alternatively, Crashplan announced an exclusive partnership with Carbonite to "make your transition to Carbonite quick and easy." Carbonite home-user prices are competitive.

Not sure about the 'quick' statement by Crashplan - you have to re-upload everything if you switch to Carbonite.

 

[jojoba]

I use SpiderOak, but for the amount of data you have they don't seem competitive on price. I like them for security reasons.

 

[r0k]

I've become very frustrated with Crashplan. If a computer gets marked "inactive" for a period of time Crashplan deletes the backup without conformation from the user. I know this because my kids' macbook pros were backed up and now when I look they are showing 0 bytes backed up. They went off to college and I thought that by paying my subscription, I was keeping their files safe. I. guess. not. At least my files are safe. Sort of. Crashplan recently announced a mandatory migration to some new service where they charge per computer per month and this new service forbids peer to peer backup or even backup to a local hard disk. Yeah. That sounds great. Charge me even more to do even less. I've been taking a long look at Carbonite and I might consider getting rid of cloud backup and going back to my old method of copying everything to a NAS disk using a shell script that runs nightly.

 

[DominikHoffmann]

Using the Arq software (one-time cost of $50) the cheapest cloud backup destinations appear to be Backblaze and Wasabi. I think, in my case it will still be hefty compared to what I am charged now. With those storage services charge not just for storage, but also for data transfers, I have actually no idea, how much I would pay, because I have no good handle on the daily and monthly data churn produced by my cloud backups.

 

[Gator1pk]

Stay away from Carbonite. About 4 years ago, I installed on my MacBook Pro 13. I upgraded the internal HHD with an internal SSD. I copied the HHD to the SSD. Carbonite acted normal. Showing files being backed up. . The SSD drive failed in 30 days. I replaced the failed SSD with new SSD. I went to restore from Carbonite. NOTHING. Like I mentioned, you could see files backing up and out in their servers. I contacted Carbonite and they said that since I had changed the hard drive, Carbonite saw it as a new computer so it was not backing up!! But I could see the activity, nothing prompted me to make any changes. Basically when I needed Carbonite, it failed miserably. I canceled the subscription and bought an Apple Time Capsule to handle backups and it has not failed me with Time Machine backups.