To the shock of many CrashPlan users, the online backup provider announced on August 22nd that it will exit the home consumer market and is now referring CrashPlan for Home users to Carbonite. As highly rated as CrashPlan is (was), Carbonite is not; its basic plan is Mac only, leaving PC users to pay more. Additionally, Carbonite only rates a 5 out of 10 rating on Tom’s Guide.*
*reference https://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-cloud-backup,review-2678.html
Within the online backup market, there are a number of providers who all complete pretty heavily to capture new customers and they’re now all pitching the CrashPlan users who are being abandoned.
Just earlier this year, we dug in and did some heavy research on all the various providers and came to the conclusion that Backblaze meets all our requirements: easy on the wallet, simple to install, uncomplicated instructions and a set-it-and-forget-it approach.
And for that reason, Backblaze is our favorite, the one that we use ourselves and recommend and install the most. The program runs in the background and continuously backups your system with no user intervention. There is no data limit and the billing is simple and affordable at $50/year. There’s a free trial from Backblaze as well. You can get that here: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html#af9kd3
Backblaze Control Panel
The other key feature which we absolutely love are the data recovery options. While you can access all of your data through the web, downloading terabytes of data isn’t really practical if you have to restore a significant portion of your data. With Backblaze, you can request to have a hard drive FedEx’ed to you with all of your data on it. Once you’ve finished restoring, you can send the drive back or buy the drive and keep it.
If you are a CrashPlan customer, we strongly urge you to consider all of your options as there are many providers out there. The folks at CrashPlan have pre-negotiated a special price to migrate users to the Carbonite platform, but that’s not our recommendation. To read more about Backblaze, here’s a great article and comparison chart: https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html#af9kd3
On a final note: Our core business at LightroomGuy.com is to work one-on-one with our clients to support them in all aspects of their digital photography workflow. Having a solid backup system in place is a critical element and we spend a lot of time with our clients making sure their systems work for them. No two clients have the same needs and one of our business philosophies is to work with our clients, and not the other way around. To that end, we are generally agnostic when it comes to recommending specific equipment or 3rd party services; we look at the features and benefits of any given solution and offer our recommendations on the relative merits.
That said, we like Backblaze so much that we both use it and officially endorse them and even have an affiliate account. If you signup using our link, we receive a small commission that costs you nothing. It’s not a lot but, what is greater is knowing that our customers’ data is safely backed up.