I recently received an email reminder that my cloud backup subscription at CrashPlan was about to expire. Wow, my initial 2 years subscription has flown by. I started looking into cloud backups back then. My previous offsite storage method was to store a hard drive offsite and periodically bring it home to update it. I realized I was not very religious about doing that, and the gaps between backups were leaving me vulnerable to losing something. I wanted something similar to Apple’s Time Machine, where I could basically set it and have it run automatically in the background.
After looking at a few services, I did an initial trial with Carbonite. It seemed OK until I realized they throttled my upload speed after reaching a particular limit, something like 250 GB. Don’t quote me on that; I am only going by memory. For a photo archive, it was way too low. I used a little online calculator that estimated it would take years to get a full upload done. That is a common issue often brought up on cloud backup, many internet services upload speeds are still quite pitiful vs. the download speeds offered. Many services now offer “seed drives” where you can send a hard drive to them through the mail and just deal with incremental backups online. But the throttling of my upload speed was a natural deal killer on my first try.
Then I moved on to CrashPlan, which offered a pretty good signup deal. I did the initial trial; the software was relatively easy to use and ran in the background on my Mac. It is highly configurable, allowing me to select multiple drives and many other options I haven’t even utilized yet. And – no throttling. Still, I was limited by my relatively slow upload speed via cable internet. I didn’t do the seed drive (which I might do in hindsight). Instead, it took about a month to get everything I wanted stored offsite up in the cloud.
Since then, it has run without issue. The files are encrypted, so I am not so concerned with photo theft. Incremental backups now take a much shorter period of time than the initial one, typically no longer than a day or so, often just a few hours. Most of all, I enjoy the peace of mind an offsite backup brings. It might take a while for me to get it wholly localized again if something happens. However, download speeds are much faster than uploading, and I have never needed instant access to every photo in my archive anyway.
I have no affiliations with CrashPlan – just a happy customer.
UPDATE 2024-02-27: In 2022, I switched to BackBlaze.
One of my to do tasks is upgrade my home office NAS, used as a local backup for my photos, computers, and other data. I think of it as my home cloud! When I do, I was considering taking the old NAS and hosting it at a friends house and syncing nightly (feature built into NAS). But Now I’m thinking using something like crash plan might be better. If only they had an agent that ran on the NAS… Thanks for sharing this!
Really good information Mark. I have to admit I had not heard of CrashPlan. As some others had mentioned 4-5 years ago I was using Mozy simply because they were the only one (I was aware of) at the time that would backup external drives. They raised their prices so for the last 4-5 years I have been doing my own backups with multiple externals but as you mentioned I too am not at all religious about it. For fun I just looked at Mozy’s prices. Holy Guacamole! To backup a minimum of 2TB which is what I would need to be looking at Mozy is over $200 per month. While CrashPlan has unlimited for as low as $3.96 per month with a 4 year plan? I hope I am looking at that right, if so you need a commission because I think you just sent them a new customer. Thanks for the info.
That sounds about right Brad. They have very reasonable pricing. The best commission I could receive is if they save you on a file recovery! Like I mentioned, it takes awhile for that initial backup if you don’t do the seed option, but after that, unless you have tens of GB per shoot to backup, the incremental updates don’t take that long.
Mosy was so slow when I tried it that I gave up on cloud-based backup. Good to read about CrashPlan.
I was so disappointed with mosy a few years back I gave up on c
I do not use cloud for file storage. I rely instead on classical flashdisk aand usb hdd. I use only Evernote..
You actually turned me on to CrashPlan about two years ago, Mark. I’ve been a happy customer ever since…at least after that first long month initial upload (cable upload speed.) I never think about it now and I’ve got mine set to backup at night between 12-7am so it doesn’t interfere with anything else.
How funny I have been doing the same research myself into a Cloud backup plan. I just tried CrashPlan’s trial period and of course I did not get all of my files uploaded during the trial. But I was happy with the ease of use and the software itself. I think I am going to use them too, after I clean up my drives, there is a lot of junk on them I need to weed out. Thanks for the feedback, cinched my decision to use CrashPlan!
I’ve only heard good things about CrashPlan. Including the price. I’d use it if I hadn’t signed up to SkyDrive (now OneDrive) when it first came out. I think it would be too much work to transfer everything across; like you, my upload speed is somewhat slow.
I remember when you switched to CrashPlan. At the time, I was using a plan called Mosey … and boy wasn’t that name befitting! It was sloowwwwwwwwww. 🙂 I tried CrashPlan myself and have been a happy customer ever since. It’s so seamless that I usually forget that it’s there unless I get an email saying that it hasn’t be able to make a backup in x number of hours. However, that is very rare, indeed.
I do like those reminders also Paul! 🙂 I do recall something about you playing around with Mosey now. Wow, how time flies.
I’ve not looked seriously at cloud storage in a while, because historically it’s been pretty pricey and not terribly convenient. I’ve had an off-site backup method of keeping a drive at my office, which is easy and effective. Just recently though it seems like cloud storage has finally started to look affordable, to the point where it probably makes sense to revisit it. Just this week I read about Dropbox coming up with reasonable pricing for a good amount of storage. I’m still using less than 2TB, which is not excessive and probably low as photographers go.
Earl may chime in here, but I’m pretty sure that he uses CrashPlan.
Cool to get your thoughts on this, Mark. I was looking at Crash Plan this week and may sign up for it shortly. Thanks!