1.5 Years! I don’t think so! Though to be fair I do have 5.3 TB of data, and the 1.1 TB music drive is on a NAS connected via 10/1000 ethernet, but still! And the number does change. I see it go down to 6 months sometimes, but I also find that for a good portion of every day it seems to be just scanning my drives, and not uploading. And I am on Fios with 35 Mb up and down so I have a fairly fast connection.
I am thankful for the free 30 day trial so I could learn this, very cool, otherwise I would have purchased and realized I would paying for likely 2 years before I had a full backup! Now way!
Now I went with CrashPlan after reading all about it, and seeing reviews and it does look like an excellent cloud based backup solution. And it’s Java based app is easy to use and free and can be used for local backups as well.
And they have many plans, from 32.99 for 10GB, 59.99 for unlimited on one computer and $149.99 a year for unlimited on 5 computers. Seems reasonable, though you can only download a certain amount and must pay and send a hard drive for more, (EDIT: I was wrong, they don’t charge to download, which is awesome, thanks to the comment) but it does keep your data secure away from your home.
I wanted a cloud backup as I had a drive go down recently and it really screwed me, but I don’t think this is the solution. I am still thinking a large local storage would be better for me, though I certainly can’t afford it right now.
EDIT: And yes I do have a local backup, though not of everything, I just don’t currently have the hard drive space. I have a 3TB backup, and everything on MUSIC is RAID 1, so I have a copy of what is on there, but if things get messed up, they will be messed up in both places.
ADDITIONAL: Been keeping Crashplan running, hoping it will jump forward and have downloaded a lot more by the time the time the demo is over so will then buy it and use it. Lots of the time it seems to spend re-scanning all my drives, and with the amount I have, that takes a lot of time, but yesterday I came home to this:
HA! 10.5 Years huh? And when I tried to snap the picture it was 11.5 years, but I didn’t snap fast enough! Now I know that isn’t the actual time, but that is a long time to say it needs to back up!
I need a big raid as storage, but with redundancy, though I do like the idea of an offsite solution with great encryption, which Crash Plan is. It just isn’t for someone with the storage needs that I have.
Hi Jonah,
Thanks for giving CrashPlan a try! 5.3 TB is a LOT of data, and backing up or restoring it over the internet will take a long time. The speeds you'll see will vary–1.5 years is on the longish side–but it would still take a few months to upload or download everything from CrashPlan Central.
If you don't yet have a local backup, I'd *strongly* recommend getting that set up first. CrashPlan can back up to local drives for free, and you can also take a drive offsite to a friend and back up over the internet to their computer for free, which would be a great way to get offsite backup fast (because you can skip the internet for initial backup and just use for updates) and cheap.
One thing I would note is that CrashPlan doesn't limit how much you can restore over the internet. You can restore your entire backup over the internet if you want. Restoring via hard drive is faster for larger backups though. The limit you may be thinking of is for restoring via the web browser restore interface.
Again, thanks for checking us out, and if you have any other questions, let me know! You can also talk to our Customer Champion team with questions.
Thanks,
Ryan at Code 42 (Makers of CrashPlan)