Back Me Up, Buttercup
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I have reviewed online backup services before, but I never bit the bullet and signed up for any of them. I didn’t want to pay to access my data, and I didn’t like not knowing where exactly the “remote location” was that stored my data. Today I received an email about another service, which gave me a review account.
Crash Plan appears to have taken all the good elements of other online backup services and rolled them into one. For a $20.00, one-time fee, you get the software that will allow you to remotely backup 50 GB of data. Yes… I said 50. There are bigger plans for more money as well as a monthly subscription service.
The cool thing is that this is completely cross platform. You can back up the data from your Windows machine to your Mac. You can back up the Mac data to your Linux box. You can take the… you get the picture. To me, that alone is worth the $20.00. To be able to back up each of my systems onto each other is just amazing — and the way to go. Of course, you also go the route of remote backup, which can give you peace of mind if you have important data that would be devastating to lose in a catastrophic situation such as a fire, flood, tornado, or any act of nature.
Let’s look at a few of the features of Crash Plan:
- No buttons to push or CDs to burn. Simply install CrashPlan and it quietly runs in the background protecting your files without slowing you down.
- With CrashPlan and your own destination, there are no fees or extra charges like other off-site backup products and no limits on how much you can back up.
- Your files are encrypted, off-site and at multiple destinations of your choosing. Only off-site backup protects your files from theft, fire, and other local disasters. CrashPlan insures your privacy by encrypting your files before they are sent, keeping personal files personal.
- CrashPlan gives you freedom in choosing your backup destinations. Back up your new Mac to your old PC, your laptop to a friend’s desktop, whichever you want. Worried about using too much space on a friend’s computer? No problem! CrashPlan will use an attached USB drive to hold your files.
What other backup programs or services do you know of or use? Are you happy with them? Have you come across any horrible ones? Leave me a comment to this video, or send an email to me at chris@pirillo.com and let me know about your backup experiences.
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5 Comments
rod p
November 16th, 2007
at 12:05am
the format of the EMAIL newsletters on or about Nov 9
changed (drastically) for the worse.
Saves me a lot of time wading thru my EMAIL tho
since I dont have to read them anymore.
Bill Webb
November 16th, 2007
at 4:39am
Hi Chris,
I’m slightly confused (it’s early) about what you get for the $20. Is it 50 GB of off-site storage and unlimited data transfer? Also, what files does the software deal with automatically?
I’ve been using Carbonite for a couple of years, and it has done a good job for me on two occasions, once when a bad Windows update made formatting a hard drive much easier than troubleshooting, and also when I bought my new PC last year. Both times the performance was flawless. It backs up C:\Documents and Settings, essentially. As long as the goodies are stored in the usual places like My Docs, My Music, etc., they’re dealt with automatically. My files tend to run in the 25 GB range, but I back my image files up to other storage. With images it would run a lot more. Carbonite has no limits.
CrashPlan sounds really interesting. I hope you’ll let us know how it works out after you’ve had some extended use.
Jeff Partridge
November 16th, 2007
at 6:37am
“the route of remote backup, which can give you peace of mind “???
I think it’s a lot more like ‘REMOTE BACKUP - use it if you’re OUT of your mind’…
What about data security? No-one, from the US government to your life insurance company or your bank, is able to give any meaningful assurance that your personal data won’t be going out the door that night with the janitor. And you want me to to hand over critical and highly personal data to them??? Not to mention that things like fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and other wrath-of-God stuff can happen to datacenters just as eaesily as they might to my house. Depending on where you live, some of those things might even be MORE likely at some California datacenter. Then consider an everyday hazard, such as the company holding my backed up data simply goes out of business. The assets get sold to the highest bidder and suddenly my data (on their hard drives) gets sold to some identity thief in East L.A.
Let this not stand as any indictment of data backup. Like any other semi-sane person, data backup is right there in my heart, just like anti-virus and snti-spyware software. This highly cautious person sure isn’t going to put his data in harm’s way!
AllMarblehead
November 23rd, 2007
at 11:23am
I’m a Carbonite user and I just wanted to respond to your posting about Crash Plan. I’ve seen these peer-to-peer backup schemes before and I just don’t see why anyone would bother with shuttling data among their own PCs when $50 a year gets your backup done to a professionally managed data center, with unlimited capacity. A lot of people back up to external hard drives – that’s easy. But they are no safer than your PC. You probably saw the story recently about Francis Ford Coppola – someone broke into his house and stole his computer and his backup drive and he lost 15 years of photos and writing. He’s offering $100,000 for its return. Backing up to “another computer you trust†may appeal to some people, but what a pain in the neck. You have to set the whole thing up, the other computer has to be on 24 hours a day and the backup probably eats up a good portion of the disk space. Maybe this is a good solution for college kids or techies who enjoy computers, but not for people who really have valuable data, have other work to get done, and don’t want to screw around with home-brew solutions.
As for the off-site backup, I wouldn’t trust my data to any old company. There are a few vendors out there that are either part of big company or are well-funded and have major relationships (like Carbonite’s relationship with Microsoft) that give you some confidence that they know how to store large amounts of data without losing it and that privacy and security is adequately addressed.
Ron Vargas
November 23rd, 2007
at 1:49pm
I’ve been using Carbonite. It’s so unobtrusive that you forget it’s running. Sometimes I try restoring some files just to make sure. Seems to be right up to date all the time. Had good experience with their customer support, too. Nice to have at least one thing I don’t have to worry about every day.