A Plan for CrashPlan

Photo by Mike Birkenshaw, CC-BY-SA 2.0

I’ve been a very long-time CrashPlan user at home. In fact, I will have been backing up my data there for five years next month. I’ve also recommended it to many friends and family since it’s been consistently cheap and unlimited. Unfortunately, they have decided that they will no longer be serving home users and have given me 3 months to figure out how I plan to deal with that.

This isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of decent alternatives out there. Backblaze offers rock-bottom pricing on unlimited backup, around $50 per year per system. Carbonite (a perennial favorite) is a good deal if you have a lot of systems (4+) but not much data (<250GB). But all of these systems fall completely flat on a key feature for me: no Linux support.

While backing up my desktops and laptops is very important, backing up my NAS is mission-critical. All of my DVDs, Blu-rays, and CDs (as well as those from basically every single extended family member) are ripped to a FreeNAS sever with Plex. Needless to say, it would be a lot of work to recreate a media library that now totals 8.1TB. CrashPlan is the only unlimited storage provider offering a native Linux client. Even with the price increases, $10/mo isn’t bad at all.

The biggest downside, though, is that the migration process from Home to Small Business can only migrate up to 5TB. Now I have to do a complete backup of everything I already have, a process that took literally a year to complete. I’m fortunate enough to have a friend willing to let me leech his 200Mbps fiber connection, but that requires transporting two systems 45 minutes away and leaving them there for a week. Woof.

So what do you need to do if you’re using CrashPlan? Here’s the TL;DR.

• If you have four or more devices and not a lot of data: Give Carbonite a shot. Unlimited devices with 250GB of data. Mac and Windows only.
• If you have a lot of data or 3 or fewer devices: Backblaze is unlimited data but they charge per device. Mac and Windows only, but they sound open to adding Linux in the future.
• If you have a lot of data and need to back up Linux devices: CrashPlan Small Business is the only game in town worth looking at here. There’s software you can use to back up to “cold” storage like Amazon Glacier or Backblaze B2, but it’s more expensive once you get past a few terabytes of data. WAY more expensive. The only sucky part of upgrading is any backup over 5TB goes into the trash and you have to upload it all again, a very painful process.

For me, I’m going to be using CrashPlan Small Business for my NAS and Backblaze on my desktops and laptops.