CrashPlan crashes out of cloudy consumer backup caper Code42 Software, operator of the Crashplan cloud backup service, has decided it's had enough of providing its services to consumers. The company, based in Minnesota, US, has not said why other than it's reached a decision to “focus all our efforts on the business and organisation market” and to “shift our business strategy to …
Ah, useful. I hadn't come across Duplicacy in my reading since the big CrashPlan announcement.
They could be just what I need, for some Linux systems I have, and using one product across Linux and Mac would be easier (Arq was the leading contender, for the latter)
My laptop syncs specific folders once a day to my desktop and vice versa. And that's in addition to important files being stored in dropbox, and photo's being synced automatically to google photo's and amazon photo's.
All of which is really just a fail safe in case fails before I connect and sync changes to an external hard drive.
Yeah I got hardware/software trust issues. I want at least 3 things to go very wrong before I lose anything I care about.
I guess I'll have to revisit software that will let me backup files between two computers for free. Any suggestions?
if you are really paranoid, you could use macrium reflect to make images of the disk. get it to do grandfather / father /son or similar, and then use carbonite to back those up.
good thing about macrium is that it will email you on success / failure. workstaion version is about £50. v7 also has a crypto guard feature that allegedly only allows macrium to write over / to the backup destination. havent tried that bit yet, but you can just remove authenticated users and your own account from ntfs permissions of the backup disk, this'll further reduce the attack surface
Crashplan had a pretty unique product, and could probably have made more money out of it if they wanted to.
Crashplan gave me:
* Windows, Linux, Apple clients.
* Backup peer-to-peer (excellent for family members, laptop, backing up to my desktop).
* Backup to cloud (belt and braces copy).
* Backup to local disk (quick-to-restore copy).
* Versioned file changes.
* Long-term retention of deleted files.
* Reasonable pricing for multiple machines (e.g. family group).
* Unlimited or very cheap storage.
The well-known ones like Backblaze, SpiderOak, Carbonite all tend to be OK for a single computer, but get very expensive backing up multiple machines (e.g. for a family).
* Duplicati, perhaps?
* Arq looks like a possible alternative, but doesn't work on Linux
* Goodsync, perhaps, but it doesn't keep history.
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The well-known ones like Backblaze, SpiderOak, Carbonite all tend to be OK for a single computer, but get very expensive backing up multiple machines (e.g. for a family).
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Years ago I had Carbonite, but they started trottle if you had more than 100GB, When I switched to crashplan it only took me 2 days to sync my 200GB. My only complain with Crashplan is that often my storage pool has not been online when I needed to restore a file. I had to wait up to an hour.
My employer just dropped CrashPlan in favor of "everyone for themselves, f*ck your data!" Apparently the cost was going to increase from something like $4/user to $10/user (per month). Guess corporate just thinks it's cheaper to pay employees to manually upload files to a cloud host DAILY instead of $10/mo to do it automatically.
Considering how many people were too lazy to even bother installing CrashPlan, I'm not really sure data retention is a priority for us.
I use Duplicity and back up to an Amazon S3 bucket, with the archive files automatically moving into Amazon Glacier after 30 days. I'm quite selective about what I back up, so my archive is just under 90GB. But my last monthly bill was something like 47 yankee cents.
The downside is that; retrieving stuff would require unfreezing it from Glacier and back into the S3 bucket again, which is quite slow and a lot more costly. But, since this backup is only the supplemental 'braces' to the 'belt' of my local NAS backup, I'll only have to call on it in the direst of emergencies.
In the meantime, I have the security of knowing that backup is there, for a few pennies a month.
I did, bit the bullet and use Arq backup with Google Cloud Storage coldline level for data backups.
Its billed monthly based on storage used and costs when generating egress traffic (i.e., downloading backups if you need them). My bill for storing a few TB of system backups with incrementals is between $3 and $6 a month. Varies based on what new files I upload, but it's easy to calculate. The client is easy to use and works without interaction.
I think the only reason more people don't use GCS is because its pricing and configuration with supported backup clients is slightly opaque, but after the company I'd backed up a dozen systems to went out of business I'd had enough. I'm happy to pay $10 or $15 a month to ensure guaranteed backup storage with the world's largest data barn...
For smaller quantities of live backups at an all in cost, Spideroak is still excellent though comparatively expensive. For your random crap like videos, photos and so on, just buy a 4TV NAS with a UPS and DIY.
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