BACKUP: Carbonite, Mozy, or Crashplan?

A few years ago I used Mozy backup and found it very easy to use and not so expensive - until my hard disk crashed. Then it took me ages to get all the data back and it also cost me a lot to download it all.
Now I have an external hard drive which I use for backups.

I'd like to reiterate Rick Conley's comment. An external hard drive works out a lot cheaper than any "cloud" based storage. I bought a 2TB one for $129. Now do the math and tell me which makes the most sense.

I've been using Carbonite since 2008. I find it to be a great service and perfect for my needs. I'm currently backing up around 60GB. I had a hard drive crash last Spring and was able to recover all my data via Carbonite.

I recently discovered that they offer service for my Android device at no additional charge! Carbonite is now backing up all the photos and videos on my Samsung Galaxy S III, as well as offering a lost phone feature that will locate my phone, snap a picture of the perpetrator and wipe my data. I can also send a signal to the phone that will make a noise so I can find it nearby. I'm currently paying a fee to T-Mobile that includes that service so I'm planning to drop that and save myself around $4/month.

Backblaze is very similar to Crashplan, and when I emailed both with questions, Backblaze responded much quicker.

I suppose there are good reasons for using one of these services, but years ago I simply bought an ext USB drive. Now I have two, one at the desk and the other is off site. Once a month I swap them so the worst case would be losing a couple weeks of data. Ext drives are cheap and very fast.

EDITOR'S NOTE: That's the rub... you need to have the discipline to have TWO backup drives, AND remember to swap them every week/month. You've also got to find a good, safe offsite backup location that's not likely to be affected by fire, flood, hurricane, etc.

I have posted the theme of this comment possibly here and certainly elsewhere and had very little response. My point is: How do you upload a large amount of data for back-up (in my case, well over 160 gigs of music and documents), without driving a horse and carriage through an ISP's data cap and without it taking a year and a day to execute? I consider myself lucky that I now have fibre-to-the-cabinet here in the UK with a download of about 25 megs after years of lousy copper-wire snail-like speeds but the upload speed is still only consistently around 5 megs, so how can the upload feat be achieved easily? Cloud back-up seems to me to be impractical for a domestic user with limited resources.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The answer is a "seed drive" or as Mozy calls it, a Shuttle Drive. For your initial backup, they mail you a drive, you load it up, and mail it back.

What about Backblaze? I've been using that service for some time now and am very satisfied with their service.

Quote: "EDITOR'S NOTE: That's the rub... you need to have the discipline to have TWO backup drives, AND remember to swap them every week/month."

Not really. My backups are auto-scheduled so it happens in the background. Also, my email sends a reminder on the first of the month, so I don't have to remember anything, Also, my 200 gb drive would either cost a lot or take forever with these sites. Ext drive takes about 10 minutes.

Obviously lots of PC users on here, because I haven't heard anything said about the built in backup plan for Apple. Apple's "Time Machine" can be configured multiple ways--I currently have mine on an external hard drive. It copies all file changes once an hour for a day, then once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year. It only copies user files, not applications, but I believe that is the way mine is configured. Frankly, it runs in the background and I don't even think about it. I just looked at my screen and it is backing up my system as I type this! As the allocated drive space fills up, it deletes the oldest file. I currently have March 2011 as my oldest archive available. I won't swear to it--like I said, I don't have to even think about this, so I don't--but I believe it dynamically saves more versions based on number of files saved and size of the hard drive available. And I do know that Apple has a wireless networked version now available where you can have all your systems backed up automatically to a single drive. So for Apple users, this is pretty much a "set it and forget it" issue.

I had a subscription to Carbonite for a year, but I switched to iDrive, and I'm happy I did. I left Carbonite because it screwed up so often: several times a month, I'd get a message that I didn't have files selected for backup (but of course I did). I'd have to uninstall and reinstall -- as often as I had to do it, it was a major inconvenience.

A while back I took your suggestion to use JustCloud. This company is not ready for real time. On 3 separate occasions they couldn't find my account, their sync feature doesn't work and when I pointed that out I was told "we're working on it" with a tone that indicated it wasn't too important to them. It only took 3 emails and a phone call to get my money back- at least they say it is coming.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I don't recall mentioning it. Where did you read about it?

I've been using iDrive for about a year and a half. Works fine.

Online backup is better thing for every one ts a very important. you can access this anytime and anywhere…

Livedrive

I have 8tb of data. How long would this take on a 75mbps connection?

I've been using Crashplan and it's fantastic. On my main computer I use their online storage and an external hard drive. Currently I have about 60GB of documents, photos, etc. reliably saved.

I started uploading to Amazon Glacier it is very cheap and recommended if you have huge amount of data , I 've got a Zoolz Home unlimited account for 2 $ / month.

Love Carbonite. Used it twice. Flawless

Backed up 100 GB of photos with Carbonite three years ago. Went to do a restore after a disk crash and found that they had LOST much, if not Most, of my files. Carbonite totally stinks!!

I used Mozy for a while when they first came out -- before Carbonite was popular. It was simple to use. Until I lost everything. It was a horrible experience, as someone else here posted, and took forever. Perhaps they've fixed that problem, but I moved on.

Tried Carbonite for a few years, but it kept dying and stoving up my system with its resource usage. I was on the phone with 3rd tier tech support for literally 4 to 5 hours a month. In the end, a complete uninstall/reinstall worked. But I was tired of paying for backups that weren't happening.

Got a partial refund from Carbonite and signed up with Crashplan Pro a couple of months ago. So far, so good. On top of uploading silently and almost imperceptibly, and giving me the ability to pause uploads when I'm using something resource-intensive, it also allows me to backup on my external drive. (Not sure if the other two had this option, but if so, I never noticed.)

Hopefully, Crashplan will stay as trouble-free as it is now.

Interesting article. I've been using RossBackup for 3 months now. I switched from Carbonite because their customer service stunk. I am paying about $4.00 a month (I used a coupon from FaceBook) and have backed up 3.1 TB already. My computer is running fine and The customer service is fantastic. Although it's a relatively new company, they have really given me no reason to complain.