With recent news of Mozy starting to charge a lot more for their backups, there has been lots of panic of what to do. We all need our backups and they really should be offsite. So like many of my friends, my bill was going to go up over 1000% (some of my friends calculations were over 2000% increase). So what do we do? Well as a storage geek I sat down and looked at many of the competitors. But my main two requirements was “it isn’t going to break the bank each month” and “mom can do it”. Money is always a factor in everything. And I am not rich so I have to work within my budget.

Unlike myself, my mother is not a geek. The backup solution has to just work, and not give her all sorts of pop-ups/messages/alerts. The less she knows about it the better. Now her machine is a Apple Macbook so it is not online all the time (or even on). So the software has to be able to restart itself and continue when she is online.

So I looked at Carbonite, Backblaze, S3 (not really backup software but cloud storage), F-Secure and Crashplan. I am running (as I type this) backups using Carbonite and Crashplan+ on my MacbookPro. Yeah both of those and Mozy running will impact the network connectivity a little. Carbonite keeps stopping the backup. I am guessing it is trying to start a connection to a new carbonite server that I have not given it permission to talk to yet and it aborts. Crashplan+ started when I said go and and run continuously since then. I probably shouldn’t be running all three together and that might cause a little skew. But they should be able to work with other stuff is running on the computers. So here are the results….

Backblaze

I have heard rumors and horror stories over the years about them so they were already low on my list.

• Windows and Mac clients (no Linux) [good/good/bad]
• $5/month per computer for “unlimited” [good pricing]

not the winner.

S3

There would have to be some backup software on top of S3 storage. Plus their pricing takes someone with a PhD in mathematics to understand.

• No clients/software directly, must go with 3rd party [bad]
• pricing is cheap but unable to guestimate the monthly price. [bad]
• not “mom friendly” [really bad]

not the winner.

F-Secure

F-Secure is known as an anti-virus software company and not a backup company. Henri (henriwithani) recommended this as an option.

• Windows and Mac clients (no Linux) [good/good/bad]
• not “mom friendly”. If you look at the screens of how configure/run the backups, there is way too much there for her. [very bad]
• Says it is secure but doesn’t tell us how it is secure (what encryption method and key strength). ROT13 is encryption but anyone can decrypt it.

not the winner.

Carbonite

This is a good choice (even back when I was pushing Mozy). Has lots of options.

• Windows and Mac clients (no Linux) [good/good/bad]
• $55/year which is a good price point [good]
• Can access your backed up files via web browser, iPhone, Blackberry & Android. [good and bad]
• Encrypted files using 128bit Blowfish. [good not great]

They mention that your files are safe from anyone getting into them since they are encrypted but I can access them from my iPhone? there is not a lot of processing power there to decrypt files. I suspect they decrypt the files and send them to the iPhone decrypted (over SSL link). Which means they can get to your files.

not the winner but a close second.

Crashplan/Crashplan+

This had the most options out there. And the pricing is great.

• Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris clients [good/good/good/cool]
• Free if you want to backup to either external drive (like a USB drive), to another computer at your home, to a friends computer. Or you can backup to their cloud for a low price (you can do either per computer or family plans so it hard to give hard numbers here). [great]
• 128bit or 448bit encryption (non plus vs plus versions). [good/great]
• Continuos backups (plus version) so you never loose files. [good]
• “mom friendly”. [good]

So this option peaked my interest the most. It gets all my (intel) Macs (iMac, & Macbookpro). It gets my linux machines (which I have LOTS which I wont be backing up most of them). It is mom friendly. Plus I can do “backup to a friends house” option. Which is awesome. So in a follow up posting to this, I am going to spec out and build my Crashplan+ backup server (just a linux host with lots of space and crashplan+ running).

@Crashplan tweeted this morning (Feb 2nd) that they will give all Mozy users switching to them %15 off the purchase (special ends Feb 15th). Which is a great marketing idea for any of the competitors to Mozy.

the winner.

more to come soon….
part 2 is here.