December 14, 2010 by David K. Sutton
Quicknote: Cloud Backup with CrashPlan
Read my more detailed cloud backup overview and CrashPlan profile here.
I have recently chosen to supplement my offsite hard drive backups with cloud (online) backup. The service I have chosen is CrashPlan (www.crashplan.com). The main reason for choosing CrashPlan is their great pricing on unlimited online backups as well as no silly file restrictions like Carbonite (www.carbonite.com). At the same time I decided to upgrade my Verizon FiOS internet from 20/5 to 25/25 to hopefully give me a little more upstream bandwidth for the online backup. I was able to choose a bundle with Verizon that only costs me a few dollars more per month so it was worth it regardless of whether CrashPlan takes advantage of the extra speed or not. So far 210GB has been backed up to CrashPlan in about 5 or 6 days of running constantly. This is out of a total of 1.8TB (which will eventually have another 1TB added on when I start backing up another mapped network drive in the future). I will be writing a more in depth profile of CrashPlan in the future after I have used it for at least a few weeks but so far it is working really well. My only complaint so far is that the maximum upstream speed I’ve seen it use is around 9Mbps and that was only for a brief period of time. Most of the time it is at 6Mbps or lower. I would say an average over a 24 hour period is probably only around 3Mbps. That’s definitely leaving a lot of bandwidth on the table which is unfortunate. However, after the initial large backup is complete it probably won’t matter so I don’t consider this to be a dealbreaker at this point. But it would be nice to see them address the speed in the future.
