You can specify which folders and external hard drives are backed up.You can limit the times at which the backups are performed.You can limit the bandwidth being used by the backups.With CrashPlan, you get much more granular control over a few important things:

You literally just install it and turn it on – that’s it. Backblaze offers a very set-it-and-forget-it product. BackblazeĪll the research I did suggested these were the two best cloud backup services. So please keep this in mind! Cloud backup services are usually unlimited in size, and only cost about $50 or $60 per year, which is much cheaper than most cloud sharing services too. These are VERY different kinds of services. On the other had, the second group of “cloud file sharing” services like iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive, allow you to store files on them that are not even on your computer, and you can share those files with other people and access them all day long from a variety of interfaces. The files in the cloud are simply a mirror of the files on your computer. You can download the files if you’ve had some kind of emergency, but in no way are the interfaces designed for you to be constantly pulling files from the backups for daily usage. They are NOT designed for constant cloud access to the files. These services are for making backups of your files for emergencies. In the former group we have products like Backblaze, CrashPlan and Carbonite.

What it showed me is that there is a slight misunderstanding between cloud backup services and what I might call “cloud file sharing” services. I asked some questions about services like this to my Facebook followers and we had a wonderfully insightful conversation (you really should follow my Facebook page by the way…). Given that a year’s subscription to CrashPlan for unlimited uploads is only $59.99, it’s not the end of the world if I find little use for it and at least I can do some real-world testing. Recently I was having a re-think about this though, and since I’ve received so many questions about these kinds of services in the past, I decided to give it a try. For a long time I have ignored cloud backup services like BackBlaze and CrashPlan because I wasn’t sure if my glacial Canadian upload speeds would work well for something like that. I’m forever tweaking my backup routine to suit my evolving business, and refine my workflow.

Crashplan cloud backup