Replacing Crashplan

I’ve been pretty happy with Crashplan for five years or so, although lately not so much. Obviously, one reason to be unhappy with Crashplan is that they’re no longer supporting the family plan I was using to back up all our Macs. Worse, their quality of service seems to have (understandably) slipped as my plan approaches its termination.

Exhibit 1: my wife bought a new laptop. When she tried to restore files from her old laptop, they were MIA.

So, here we are at a nasty juncture where our supposedly bulletproof fire-and-forget backup system is (a) not working terribly well and (b) shortly going to not work at all.

Possible Crashplan Replacements

The obvious replacement is Carbonite. The problem with Carbonite is that it’s going either (a) be a lot more expensive than Crashplan was (because of our family plan — which is the equivalent of, effectively, n $100/year plans where n is the number of computers you back up; the small business plan works out as being stupidly expensive if you have more than 250GB of data) or (b) require me to do a bunch of work (i.e. set up one computer as the family server, have all the other devices back up to it, and then back it up via Carbonite. So Carbonite will either cost $300 (say) per year or $100 per year but require me to be my own network engineer. Oh, and forget mobile backups.

If I want to do a whole bunch of work I might as well just use Amazon S3. For 2TB of data that’s a mere $46/month. Ouch. I could probably use their cheaper long term storage, but now I’m basically starting my own Crashplan / Dropbox implementation and that sounds kind of like hard work. Forget that.

So, on to the “consumer” options (I’ve tried to pick 2TB plans as this is the absolute minimum I can live with):

  • Dropbox — $99 p.a. 1TB (there is no 2TB plan)
  • Box — $540 p.a. for unlimited (3 computers)
  • Hubic — $60 p.a. 10TB
  • Amazon — $120 p.a. 2TB
  • Google — $240 p.a. 2TB
  • Microsoft — $99 p.a. 5 users, 1TB/user
  • Apple — $120 p.a. 2TB (no Android client)

(Edit: TablePress was a disaster.)

Note that all these services support web browser access, so you can get at your files from any device with a web browser, but I’m talking about file-system integration where you can just save your file in the usual place and it’s seamlessly backed up to the cloud. I should note that Dropbox and Hubic even provide Linux clients. Everyone supports Mac, Windows, and iOS.

At first glance, Hubic looks like the standout value-for-money option. (Hubic is essentially like Dropbox, except it’s run by a gigantic hosting company). The problem is that I’ve found Hubic to have a poor user experience, especially with regard to performance. (My own experience is quite limited — and I’m kind of shocked that my blog post on Dropbox vs. Box vs. Hubic ranks quite high on Google searches for “Hubic Review”.) This may be a result of server location, or simply under-provisioning (10TB is so close to “unlimited” that I imagine it attracts a lot of abusive users).

(Edit: I should mention that Hubic offers both Dropbox-like services and backup services. It also has what looks like a pretty robust API. Also there are advantages to storing your data in France. On the other hand — no 2FA.)

At second glance, Microsoft OneDrive seems like a great deal at 5TB for $100/year. The problem is that it’s 5x 1TB per user, which is effectively 1TB. Still, a great deal if you’re happy with 1TB and want Microsoft Office for your family.

The shock comes at third glance — Apple’s product is competitively priced (cheaper than Dropbox!). It doesn’t support Android (surprise!) but aside from that it’s a great deal, you can share it with your family (with each person having segregated storage), it requires no real configuration and — this is the kicker — it’s smart about mirroring stuff to your devices. Want a 1TB photo library in the cloud? Great. Want it on every one of your family computers? Not so much.

Conclusion

Hubic is the clear winner in terms of price per unit storage. Apple is the clear winner in terms of functionality and comes second in price. When I take into account the fact that I pay Apple $3/month for a lower tier of storage just for convenient mobile backups it’s an even better deal (hooray for Opportunity Cost). After some consideration I’m thinking of doing both. Hubic for volume backup and iCloud for convenience.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

Followup…

I nearly gave up on Hubic. After paying for the 10TB plan I received no response and my account didn’t change… Well, until the next day. Sacré bleu! I’m still a bit concerned that the app hasn’t been updated since 2015, but it seems to work.

Anyway, I’m going to start backing up to Hubic and we’ll see how things go.

 

Further research has shown that there are two more reasonably-priced alternatives to Carbonite, notably iDrive and Backblaze. Backblaze seems very compelling for a single computer ($5/month unlimited; $4 with a two year plan), and not bad for a small number of computers (it works out as roughly the same as Crashplan for 3 computers). iDrive is offering some interesting discounts (and lets you handle any number of computers with one account) but I find the website poor to the point of suspecting the competence of the company.