After I renewed my Crashplan subscription last August, they announced, bless their hearts, they were leaving the consumer space to focus on business-only plans.
The Crashplan folks have generally been derided and criticized for that, but let’s count our blessings.
- They did not just pull the plug on my account so the data is unavailable. That’s happened to me with other vendors.
- They are honoring my subscription, so that Crashplan is still backing up my files through August 2018.
- This gives me enough time to find another online backup provider and get in a full backup before my account shuts down.
- Given Crashplan’s exit from this space, many vendors are offering discounts or plans to transition Crashplan users to their new platform.
Crashplan had a functional, unlovely interface; still, it also sported a few features that other vendors did not have and it was rock-sl. So, moving to a new vendor will involve trade-offs.
My use cases for online backup are few: back up all my key documents (mainly my Documents and Photos folders), always be on in the background to upload new or changed files, and easy download or restoration of files.
Crashplan has worked in the background for the past 5 or so years. Once I set it up, I left it alone and never touched it again. I only really ever needed to recover files using Crashplan one time. But that one time was the Black Swan, the big event no one is expecting that has outsized consequences.
That event was the 2015 burglary of our house where the bad guys stole my MacBook and my wife’s laptop, among other small items.
Yes, I had a Time Machine backup … but we now had no Mac devices of any kind in the house.
I bought a Chromebook and was able to log in through Crashplan’s web interface to download and find information we needed. We were also able to download a zip file of specific files from my wife’s account to her Windows work laptop so she had her most-needed files at her fingertips.
When I bought an iMac as the new home computer, I installed Crashplan immediately and it is running to this day. I’ve never had to open it for any reason.
I’m going with the Wirecutter’s recommendation of Backblaze as my online backup provider.
Based on my use pattern, this is a service I will interact with very little once I have set it up. If I need something right away, then I’ll have Time Machine (if I ever get the blamed Time Capsule working again) or a bootable backup. But I feel more comfortable knowing that, in the case of another Black Swan, I have a safety net.
