The Plan has Crashed

Jan 23, 2018

Earlier this year, CrashPlan announced it was abandoning its Home subscription plan - to whom I was a proud subscriber - to focus on small businesses and enterprise. Someone could say signs for this were already there, but to me it wasn't expected at all. Software wasn't updated in a while, yes, and a native Mac app had been promised for quite some time now, but the system just worked and I had already adviced many friends to sign up.
Knowing the end of my subscription would come in April and having some months to think on it, I began looking for a suitable alternative that met my needs.

Backup asset

When I first began using CrashPlan on my main Mac, the presence of Clouds was very different from now: there was no iCloud Drive I could rely on and I used CrashPlan on my MacBook Pro as a way to keep files backed up even if I was away, unable to connect to my Time Machine drive. As time passed, I began using CrashPlan to back up external drives too, because backing up big external drives to the cloud meant making the only other copy of them I could have.
Once I began looking for alternatives, I knew what I needed. With time, my backup strategies had evolved and as of now the system works like this:

• at the center of everything sits a trustworthy Mac mini, working as a server, with the online backup program installed. This Mac shares the same iCloud drive account my MacBook Pro has and it's where I plug external drives I want to be backed up;
• my great MacBook Pro backs up via Time Machine Server to the Mini's secondary hard drive via Server functionalities High Sierra native file sharing;
• my girlfriend's ASUS syncs to the Mini via Resilio, a great utility to sync documents without the need to rely on third party servers, so that the three folders on her PC that contain the most important documents are kept in sync with the Mac Mini every time she connects to the internet.

CrashPlan met all my needs: it has backup sets to give different priorities to different groups of data, it can backup external drives without limit, it runs quietly in the background. And it was cheap: with less than 4€/month I was covered. But since the service for home users has ceased, I had to look for a replacement.
The service CrashPlan partnered with to offer a smooth transition to its users didn't fit my needs at all: basic plan 60$/yr, if you want to back up an external drive the price goes up to 100$/yr! Crazy. CrashPlan itself offered me a 1 year 75% discount to its small business plan, which would have been great - but what after that year? I would have ended up paying 10$/month to the company that just turned me down? I don't think so.
I thus looked around, read opinions, compared plans.

Call the firefighters

In the end, I chose the service that offered me the most at the lowest price: Backblaze. I had read about it many times in many parts of the web, the first time - I think - years ago when I was choosing which new HD to buy for my external case. I liked the robustness of the company, the way everything was well explained, the fact they back up everything you have and external drives at the same price, the advantage you can share files you've backed up directly from Backblaze web page without the need of uploading them somewhere else. They even made a pretty self-explanatory table to list the reasons they are the best alternative to CrashPlan.
One cold night, between Christmas and New year's eve, I headed to their website, downloaded the app and begun the 15 days trial. Setting up was quite easy (they basically back up everything) and their app is a native macOS one. I set everything up, left the secondary internal HD checked as it already was, connected my external HD with more than 3TB of data to back up and left for a week of vacations with Backblaze running at full speed with no limit on output bandwidth.
When I first had installed CrashPlan, it had taken months to complete the backup, and back then my data footprint was much smaller. Through the years, every addition to the backup set would take a lot of time to be uploaded to the cloud. It didn't bother me much, I had no other backup speed to compare it to. Now I have. Backblaze is way, way faster! Having no practical bottle neck on my fiber-optics internet connection, Backblaze began backing up at the fastest speed it could reach (about 4Mbps) and in less than a week my whole set of data, about 2TB, was backed up. It had backed up everything before the trial even ended!

Final Words

Sometimes I miss the degree of control CrashPlan gave me over what to back up and with what priority, but that feeling is fading away already. Backblaze is the kind of backup there should be, one where you don't need to think at what or how, but instead one that just works. In this regard, speed is crucial because you can sleep sweet dreams knowing your data will be done backing up in hours, not months.
As Backblaze allows to have referral links, here's mine, details on how it works are here.
I wish it retained external HD files longer, without the need to connect it every 30 days not to lose everything, but I think I'll set a reminder just in case and not worry about it too much.

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