Any Mac Users using Crash Plan ? - or have advice on offline backup?

I already have dropbox and some icloud space but now I could do with an offsite continuing backup - I used to use Crash plan, but they stopped supporting home users - but the business plan ain’t too expensive, I need a decent speed of upload and download, and I am cautious to jump in with the cheapest option and pay the price of huge delays getting my data restored - any advice would be very much appreciated. Take Care Dave in UK

I’m using Arq backup (v.5) plus Backblaze B2 to backup online 3 Macs and it works fine (paying ~8$/mo).
Never did massive restore of files, but for the occasional restore of small amount of data worked better than time machine.
Hope it helps.

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Backblaze’s Personal backup plan would probably do you. It’s very hands-off and works in the background without your needing to do anything. I get an email every week that tells me how long it’s been since my Macs were backed up (and it’s always ‘Today’ unless I haven’t had my laptop on in a while).

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I was a long term user of Crashplan for my Windows machines and my NAS - they got increasingly fiddly and the website is a horror to use. As others here, I recommend Backblaze which is a far superior experience.

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Yeah another backblaze user here, simple and solid.

I backup to my Synology, and from there to 2 other backup locations:

  • My brother’s Synology
  • Synology C2
  • I also have an 8Tb drive attached to my mac that stores a Carbon Copy Cloner clone with safety net on.

I’m using Backblaze, coupled with Carbon Copy Cloner for local backups.

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Used it for years because I got a really good deal on a multi-year subscription. That finally expired this spring so I switched to ArqCloud for offsite. The CrashPlan client seemed to get worse instead of better over the years.

My offsite backup is for the last ditch recovery where all my other backups are gone like major fire or other calamity.

Thanks all for the replies - much appreciated , it seems like Backblaze is the way to go, but another question too - why use Backblaze ad ARQ Backup ?

Blackblaze and Carbon Copy Cloner too just like acavender. Also threw in time machine just because it is too easy.

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I’ve been using Backblaze for years and it’s always worked seamlessly. I can definitely recommend.

Blackblaze for offsite and Carbon Copy Cloner for local copies. (Before CCC I used the simpler [and more attractive] SuperDuper!, and still recommend it, and I also hear good things about Chronosync.)

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For me it’s cheaper: 3 Macs on regular backblaze 18$/mo, arq+b2 ~8$/mo, so the math is easy. Plus arq can do some local backup too, I use it to backup a windows pc at work to a nas.

edit: well, more control over backup is a thing too

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One guiding principle, keep it simple. For me that means backblaze, was using crashplan until they moved everything to the small business plans.

The only question you might need to think about, how long do you need version retention for? 30 days by default is enough for most people, but this might be important to you.

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Here’s another vote for BackBlaze.

I used CrashPlan back when this field (cloud backup) was new, and I found that with large backup sets, it would spend all of its time reindexing and put a huge load on my machine. I eventually gave up on it. (I will note that the one thing I really like was the way they handled showing past versions of a given file, where you saw all versions in one place rather than having to first find the date and then look for the version. The only other app I have found that does something similar is ChronoSync (which I think does cloud backup now, but I have not looked into it carefully, and I don’t know if the does encryption).

BackBlaze is nearly always set it and forget it, BUT I still recommend going to the website every now and then and checking that what you think should be there really is. I did once run into a problem where BB was telling me that I was fully backed up, but on the website I saw that no backups had happened for several days. Tech support was very helpful; they showed me how to reset the backup status and all has been fine ever since.

BB is the most economical solution IF you have only one computer to back up, although I am paying extra for the indefinite storage capability just in case. In my workflow, I have a desktop iMacPro which has almost everything on it, and my laptop shares files via SynologyDrive. Everything on the laptop of importance is in the SynologyDrive folder and hence is sync’d to the Desktop and send to BB from there.

DevonThink databases are stored outside SynologyDrive but kept in sync via a WebDav share on the Synology, so they get backed up from the iMacPro as well.

I do have a fair amount of stuff (music and movies) on my Synology. I have two external USBs (in one enclosure) attached there and use HyperBackup to make copies. I will likely spring for C2 storage from Synology and set up backup there, or maybe Amazon Glacier.

The desktop makes daily clones of the boot drive and and external SSD that holds my photo library (700GB) to the Synology, and also has attached a bootable clone SSD drive and a spinning Time Machine drive as well.

I like to think I have enough redundancy…

I am (or was) also a major fan of Arq, which is still in use on my daughter’s laptop going to B2. The reason I drifted away is that BackBlaze is cheaper now that I only have one computer to back up, but if I find that B2 is cheaper than C2 I might use it on the desktop to backup the Synology shares as Arq will handle network shares just fine. I have, however, been put off by the new version (version 6, I think) having heard a lot of stories that it is just not ready for prime time, and is now written in Electron…I think this re-write may prove to have been a bad decision, and I feel badly for the developer who in the past his been incredibly responsive when I have emailed with problems or questions. I hope he does resolve there issues, as I have recommended Arq to many people and still consider it to be a fantastic product, at least through version 5. It has saved me at least twice in the past, once when I lost about 500GB of archived files (which I restored from Glacier at the time, years ago and before B2 existed) and when my daughter’s laptop died 2 days after moving cross-country for graduate school. I ordered a replacement at the local (to her) Best Buy, she installed Arq and started a restore (then from B2), and in less than a day she was fully back up and running. Can’t argue with that!

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I would second that CP seems very badly coded. On all the machines I used it, it needed some custom config files, would be a huge resource hog despite the data sets not being that large. Backblaze has never needed any kind of config whatsoever. And it’s cheaper…

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Not a fan of BackBlaze at all. I tried it out but it does not seem to provide the granularity that I was looking for. In other words, there seems to be no to see what is stored in BackBlaze file by file and to easy retrieve this file. It seems like a Black hole and you have to rely on them and hope that the files are stored and restore the entire backup. I may be wrong on this point but it was not easily determined otherwise.

So since HOPE is not a strategy, I offer this recommendation of IDrive.

www.idrive.com

I can go on IDrive’s website and locate down to the individual file using the same folder structure that is on the base system and I have multiple Macs being backed up along with iPAD and iPhone.

It saved my bacon twice already. Once when my Mac was stolen in LA and another time when I had a rogue person delete files in my Dropbox account.

You can designate any files to exclude and which ones to back up so I had my Drop box files backed up.

It is the one service that is top of my renewal list. I cannot say enough good things about it. After trying BackBlaze I cancelled it during the trail period as I should not have wasted my time looking in the first place because I had a good solution. So give it a look to see if it suites your workflow and backup requirements.

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Works on Synology. That’s very interesting, thanks for the recommendation.

There is, and I’ve used it several times. You go to the website, put in your encryption key, wait a bit and all the files are listed. Check the ones you want and you can download them in a zip file, have a usb or hard drive mailed to you, etc.

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That’s just the user interface, and doesn’t affect the program that actually does the backups.