Revisiting Cloud Backup for the Home
Now that CrashPlan has discontinued it's personal/family backup service, it's time to find another solution. It's 2017 and the internet is ripe with competition in the cloud storage, backup, and sync markets.
While CrashPlan has chosen Carbonite as their recommended replacement, the best contenders I've found in the market (in terms of price and overall performance) are CloudBerry Lab and Backblaze.
CloudBerry is more of a DIY solution as it only provides backup software. You still need to sign up for some sort of cloud storage provider. However for $30 per computer and clients for Linux, Mac, and Windows, it's very affordable and gives you much more choice.
Backblaze, however is more of a one-stop shop. You sign up for a single computer at a time and backups begin immediately with their free 15-day trial. They charge $50/year (with discounts for multiple licenses), provide a native client (much better than CrashPlan's Java client), and unlimited storage for desktop users. Unfortunately their Personal plan only support Mac and Windows.
Backblaze does however offer a no non-sense cloud backup service called B2 Cloud Storage. There are many open-source client offerings for Linux as well as numerous integration options for NAS devices. Their storage costs are also far cheaper than Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. For example, 1TB of storage would cost:
- $5/month ($60/year) from Backblaze
- $21/month ($252/year) from Amazon S3
- $18/month ($216/year) from Microsoft Azure
- $20/month ($240/year) from Google
While neither Backblaze nor CloudBerry offer a Family Plan like CrashPlan did, Backblaze does offer group capabilities which make management and billing far easier to deal with.
And of course both services offer the ability to pre-encrypt your data before sending to the cloud. This ensures that your data remains private even if the cloud provider becomes compromised.
I have not investigated it much, but for those running Linux, I believe you are able to use CloudBerry as your backup client with Backblaze as your cloud storage provider.
Keep your data safe!
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