Return to CrashPlan
After five and half long years of using Carbonite, I have switched over my cloud-based to CrashPlan. This has been something that has been lingering for awhile but a recent hardware event forced the issue.
In another post, I describe my backup strategy. Even though, my strategy had multiple layers, it still failed a little bit. My main data drive on my main computer got corrupted. No big deal, I thought. It is under warranty, and I will RMA the old and get a new one. After that, I will just pull down the last good image from WHS. However, it was that smooth.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do a volume restore. It just kept failing a certain points. So next I tried to mount the WHS “Z Drive” and just copy the files over. That mostly worked. However, a whole much of family movies that I had ripped from DV tape would not restore. Kept getting a “The drive cannot find the sector requested.” I did the usual chkdsk’s and repair backup history but no change. I truly this is related to a external USB harddrive failure a few months ago and WHS really never cleaned up after itself. It never “re” backed up the data it lost because of the USB harddrive failure on the WHS server.
So next I tried Carbonite…no luck at all. Carbonite, by default, will never backup a video file. I realize that you can turn this on for a specific folder but at the end of the day, it is a horrible issue. These were never setup to be backed up because of their file extension.
In addition, I really doubt that Carbonite would have ever uploaded those files. It was so far behind. Carbonite has a “feature” that severely limits bandwidth after you have uploaded so many gig’s. It is a way for them to “manage” their “unlimited” plan. However, it makes it useless after 200 gig’s.
After researching all of the main backup providers, I chose CrashPlan. I had used CrashPlan before…strictly in a peer-to-peer mode. However,it became such a lopsided relationship that it wasn’t worth it anymore. When a computer is a backup target, all of the data needs to be able to fit a single backup volume. I could quickly outgrow that. They have had the CrashPlan Central for awhile but their pricing never really interested me until know.
The beauty of it was up to 10 computers for the same price. And the key features that are priceless: any file type and no limits: storage or bandwidth.