Why I stick with Crashplan

Updated on Sep 10, 2017 in Computer
Tags: Crashplan Backup Software

In one of my previous posts I explained why I switched from S3 to Crashplan Home. Recently Crashplan announced that they will end Crashplan Home and only offer Crashplan for Small Businesses. A few people asked me what I am going to do. I decided to stay with Crashplan for the following reasons:

Price

With the switch to Crashplan for Small Business comes an increase in price. In the small business plan every device you backup will cost you $10 per month. In the home plan I payed about $3.50 for a single device (when signing up for 4 years) which means a 300% increase in price. Some user wrote to me that he used the family plan and would now pay $60 dollar a month instead of the $12 he paid with the family plan (i.e., a 500% increase in cost).

One of my original concerns was to get a back at a reasonable price. Due to my data volume an unlimited option was the only one that made most sense financially. This change will increase my cost 3 times as much as before but I still think for the volume of my backup size it is still a pretty good deal. I only need one device to backup. I do not really care all that much for the actual computer to be backed up because all my data is on external storage. If I want to use different computer I just connect it to that storage and I am done.

I understand that this might still seem expensive for some people, but $10 dollars a month it not that much (2-3 coffees at Starbucks, I assume because I do not drink coffee). Considering how much you spend on Photography in general (cameras, lenses, software, internet, etc) that seems not too bad. In the last 3 years I used Crashplan at least 2 of my hard drives died. Nothing bad happend because I had local redundancy, but I was happy to have a remote backup while I had to replace those drives and only had a single copy locally.

Restoration

Since I started using Crashplan I had a few instances where I needed to restore some files. I have to say that the Crashplan software worked perfectly. I was able to recover the files I needed to recover and store them right where they needed to be. In other backup solution would have to download the files via a web download and then copy the files into the right place and fix all the permissions. Crashplan made this very easy. Additionally the software allows you to pause and resume restore operations. I have not use competitor services but I assume with a web download it is either all or nothing. Which can be a quite bad experience if you are traveling and have an unreliable network connection. Another great feature in the Crashplan software is that you can search your backup for certain files. This is immensely useful for finding deleted files (which I need to do a couple of times).

This great recovery tool alone makes it worth for me to spend the extra money. I prefer to have a backup solution I know that works and works the way I want it to work (which in case if Crashplan is the case).

Local Backup

The Crashplan software also allows you to backup your data to a local storage system (e.g., external hard drive). This means I can have just one backup tool to maintain all your backups. On top of that you can use Crashplan’s software for restoration with all its features. Having a local copy of your backup repository allows you to recover files much faster.