Offsite Storage Utilities
I have been recommending (and using) Mozy unlimited personal backup for quite some time. On February 1st, 2011 I received notice that they will no longer be offering unlimited data backup for a low price; as this is what sold me on Mozy, I have decided to cancel my account.
The advertisements and reviews of the new Mozy plans bluster how it can save users money by giving them the ability to back up up to 3 machines instead of one per license. That’s great if you don’t want to back up much data from each system.
In the process of moving away from Mozy I’ve tried three other backup programs, they are Backblaze, Carbonite and CrashPlan.
Backblaze offers unlimited storage for ~$5 per month, with a free trial period. After installing Backblaze I was expecting to select what files to backup; I didn’t have to. It began backing up everything, that’s great!
Did I say everything? After digging through the configuration I found an exclusion set, it wouldn’t backup executable files or iso files by default. I removed these filters, however the software informed me there were certain types of files (such as the iso file) that it would never back up. This is when I uninstalled Backblaze.
Carbonite offers unlimited storage for ~$5 per month, with a free trial period. After installing Carbonite I was informed that all I had to do was right click on a folder and choose “backup” to back it up. After the 15th folder this became annoying, especially when I was informed that the folder may contain files that it wouldn’t backup by default and that I would have to select by hand. After looking in vain for a built in configuration tool, I uninstalled Carbonite.
CrashPlan offers unlimited storage for ~$5 per month with a free trial period. The interesting part about CrashPlan is that it offers backup to ‘friends’, or any other person with CrashPlan installed; input your secret code and it’s backing up. This portion of CrashPlan is free to use even after the trial expires. When setting up CrashPlan it automatically detected files to backup, however it did offer an override configuration (like Mozy) that allowed me to choose what files to back up with a simple check. There were no excluded files that I could find in the configuration. For now this is my choice of plan, it is what Mozy was, plus more, for the same price.