Backblaze vs Carbonite

cape cod

Been living on the edge .. currently back up to an external hard drive .. but as I accumulate more and more irreplaceable files the need for an offsite back up is more evident ..

Leaning towards Carbonite but this name Blackbaze pops up from time to time.

In Smug Mug & Digital Grin land I am certain there are some strong opinions about the products ..

Interested to hear them

Thanks
don :lust

Helvegr

I used Carbonite for awhile, but had to kick it to the curb. I got very frustrated with it not always working and having to "reinstall" it all the time. I found it a little suspicious that they even had a re-install button right on the account page.

Then however when OS X Lion came out for my Mac, I upgraded. I think it was about a week after I upgraded I got an email from Carbonite stating that they do not support the new version of Lion and I should back up my files to a USB drive until they become compatible. That was the last straw for me.

I now use CrashPlan and have had zero problems. I have the family plan, so all of my computers in the house back up to CrashPlan.

I've never tried Backblaze, but so far CrashPlan hasn't given me an reasons to start looking again.

mercphoto

I'll second Crash Plan. I used their seed option, where they send you a large hard disk that their software makes the initial image to, and you overnight it back to htem (its all pre-paid shipping). What would have been a 7-month initial upload of all my data turned into 7 days, shipping both ways included.

That's the number one problem with anything cloud related -- how freaking long it takes to get your data up there in the first place. The second problem is how long it takes to get large amounts of data back in the event of calamity. (Crash Plan will send a disk to you for that problem, as well).

The "seed" option costs extra but was worth every penny.

nhpace

This is a repost from another thread on the same topic...

Crashplan (www.crashplan.com) is a great option. I use the Crashplan+ service that costs ~$10/mo. With this plan you can backup unlimited amount of data from a number of computers on your network. I have a MacBook Pro that backs up everything using Time Capsule and archive data to a Netgear ReadyNAS (RAID5 NAS). I also have a Ubuntu linux server that mounts the NAS shares via NFS. Crashplan runs on both my MacBook Pro and on the linux server. In total, my backup set is ~400GB. I also see no noticible degradation of performance on on my MacBook Pro while Crashplan is running. So far, its proven to be a great service and very affordable.

MomaZunk

Crashplan here too.
I have a PC, and a local backup by crashplan to my netgear NAS Pro, and then to the cloud.
My only complaint is after I did some computer maintenance, and changed my image to a new hard drive, Crashplan Central still says only 60% backed up. The files are there, but the system is re verifying all of the files before it will say 99%+ backed up.
This is a bit unnerving, but I have been assured by tech support that this is normal behavior.

paddler4

I too use crashplan's cloud backup. I tried Carbonite, but the speed at which it was backing up the 150 GB of images on my hard drive was far too slow. Even Crashplan, which was much faster, took about two weeks. However, once it was caught up, it was effortless. They sell an unlimited plan for a low annual fee, which they recently had reduced temporarily to $50. I have only two complaints. One is that their system keep sending me warnings that the software has been unable to reach any backup location, which makes it sound as if something is wrong, when nothing is. It does this if you leave your computer turned off for 3 days, and it seems that it might also be doing it when there are no changes to the directories selected for backup. I have checked, and nothing was wrong. The second complaint is that there is no way to turn the program off. What I would prefer--since I use them only for photos--is to have the software off until I need it. Not possible.

Because any online backup is slow, I still use a backup to an external drive when I have put a lot of new images on the computer. That way I have a reasonably secure backup while waiting for Crashplan to back up the new material, which can take quite some time.

Truly safe backups require that the backed up files not be in the same location as the primary files, and this seems to be the easiest way to do that.

Ferguson

cape cod wrote: »

Been living on the edge .. currently back up to an external hard drive .. but as I accumulate more and more irreplaceable files the need for an offsite back up is more evident ..

Leaning towards Carbonite but this name Blackbaze pops up from time to time.

In Smug Mug & Digital Grin land I am certain there are some strong opinions about the products ..

Interested to hear them

Thanks
don

To throw in a curve ball, I bought Cloudberry Backup (the program) and then can arrange my own cloud storage as I like. Right now I'm using Amazon Glacier, which is down to about 0.01/Gig/mo (with some restrictions, I also use S3 for when those restrictions are not needed).

This let's you control your storage entirely, and your bandwidth, etc. used one (Mozy) and HATED that they had all these weird throttling rules, where if they didn't want you uploading right then it just ground to a halt. Hate having them have a financial incentive to make my backups run slowly.

I prefer having a backup program that is independent of the storage media. I feel like Amazon (and take your pick of others) are here for the long haul, but who knows what will happen to the backup companies. I was a Jungle Disk subscriber before Rackspare bought and killed them (and dropped support but kept collecting money). Beware - these are all dot com businesses, expect them not to be "stable". So look for backup providers that are not "too good to be true". Make sure they have a viable business model or... well, they won't have a business after a while.