by Tadrio » Tue Dec 29, 2015 12:02 pm
There are a few cloud backup providers that offer "unlimited" space for very low prices. I personally use Crashplan and Backblaze. They both set you back around $5-$6 a month. I signed up for both because I wanted to compare and pick one, but kept the two because I'm really happy with both, and I figure it's an additional level of safety.
Both of them offer private key encryption, so your data is encrypted and decrypted locally, with a key that only you possess. Although it should be noted that both their clients are proprietary and closed-source, so you'll have to take their word for it. What's nice about both is that they just run, index, deduplicate, encrypt and upload in the background, all of your complete harddrives if you want, so you really don't have to care after setting it up, unless you end up needing a recovery. It feels nice that now if my computer exploded I would no longer be worried about the data, only the hardware costs.
I don't know how their unlimited storage works out in practice, but I have stored over 7 TB with both of them now, neither one complained or throttled my upload speed. If you're outside of North America though, Backblaze is the better choice, because uploading from overseas is much faster than with Crashplan. They're talking about adding European servers, but nothing yet, and I assume I'd have to re-upload the whole 7TB if I wanted to switch.
There are some minor differences to the services. Crashplan has a Java-based client that you'll have to tell which folders or drives to back up, while Backblaze's client is native and backs up everything by default. Both offer versioning and a buffer in which they keep deleted files, although only Crashplan allows you to configure it so that it keeps versions and deleted files indefinitely. Backblaze removes files you deleted locally after 30 days. And both offer mobile apps to access your data. They're a bit cumbersome to use if you have a 448-bit private encryption key, but it's nice to be able to access a file you forgot at home. Backblaze has a pretty low download limit for the mobile client though, I think you can't load files over 30 MB.