Amazon Drive allows users to aggregate all of their digital content, including photos and videos, in one place. The Cloud Drive is build in to Amazon devices. Users have secure access from any computer, or via their free mobile apps. Amazon Drive offers a free 3-month trial, and pricing packages based on what type of storage users seek. For $11.99/yr, users can store unlimited photos plus 5GB of videos and other files. For $59.99/yr, users can upgrade to unlimited everything (photos, videos,…
$1.99
per month
CrashPlan
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
CrashPlan® provides secure, scalable, and straightforward endpoint data backup, to help organizations recover from any worst-case scenario, whether it is a disaster, simple human error, a stolen laptop, ransomware, or an as-of-yet-undiscovered calamity.
Amazon Cloud Drive is a fantastic backup solution for storing your digital files on the web, but if you want to manage, tweak, organize or otherwise maintain those files after they have reached the cloud, the experience immediately begins to suffer. This is especially noted when major competitor products like Microsoft and Dropbox offer similar services at similar prices, but offer far better interfaces for file management.
Individuals (SOHO), families and SMBs, who have a tight budget for offsite critical company data backup are well suited to this product. Especially if you want your data to be hosted locally (Australia in our case). Larger companies, with higher requirements and budgets would be better served elsewhere. Especially when you consider the poor technical support. Although, to be fair, their poor support may just be issues with their Pro/SMB products, as opposed to their enterprise products. However, if that is the case it's a pretty poor show/indicator still.
Code42 is the most affordable backup system offering unlimited storage that I could find. I came from SOS Online Backup, which I ultimately decided to drop after my monthly rate for their unlimited plan increased by 20x.
With Code42's unlimited storage option, I don't have to worry about the fact that my backups are significant in space. As a photographer with thousands of images at stake, I need to run large backups often.
Code42 runs continuously and silently in the background of my desktop computer. It is truly "set and go", so I don't have to think about it when I'm away. It runs until the designated drive has been fully backed up to my cloud storage. It will then automatically email me once the backup is complete (or, it will email me if it encounters any errors).
Customer service is above par. Anytime I need help, a chat agent is available (chat is my communication preference), they are always friendly, and go above and beyond to resolve my needs.
The CrashPlan program installed on your computer is Java-based vs. a native application. While this makes development for CrashPlan easier, there are a lot of drawbacks to Java programs including more resources usage, less stability, and overall more clunky interface.
While this was also in the Pros category - CrashPlan is an extremely powerful and flexible program, which adds a great deal of complexity. Setting up CrashPlan isn't always a simple procedure, and depending on the complexity of your backup set, can take a while to tinker around with the settings to get everything to work properly.
The CrashPlan desktop program consists of a Java program front end, as well as a backend service - there are times when the backend service will crash, and the front end Java program will refuse to load. Typically, restarting the service or restarting the computer will resolve the issue, but sometimes more in-depth troubleshooting is required.
Perhaps one of the biggest downsides to CrashPlan is its price - at $10/month/computer CrashPlan is more than double the price of some existing backup services such as Backblaze (priced at $50/year/computer). To add salt to the wound, about a year and a half ago, CrashPlan discontinued their consumer options - which were very reasonably priced at $60/year for a single computer or a family plan priced at $150/year for up to 10 computers. When these options were discontinued, the cost of backing up with CrashPlan was effectively doubled for the same feature set.
Along with the previous example, CrashPlan had the option to back up to a remote machine on a different network with a free Crashplan account. This option was eliminated when the consumer line of services were discontinued.
While the backup service provided by CrashPlan are still first in class, the above two controversial changes have broken some trust between CrashPlan and its clients.
The system is very easy to use and it's use of apps for almost all devices and hardware makes it even easier to manage and store photos and documents. I highly recommend this as an easy to use solution for novices!
Overall great software to use for file share, storage, and collaboration. Its security is great and the user management is spot on. The only thing that makes me dock it a point is that the device management as a subset of user management is kind of clunky. It hasn't been an issue yet, but it could compromise security in the future. Overall, would recommend
Friendly and knowledgeable support team available to assist with this product. Code 42 (formerly CrashPlan) offers unlimited storage options for reasonable costs, so you really can't go wrong with this product. They have been a reliable resource for our company, and I would recommend to others looking for an easy setup with unlimited storage.
Amazon Drive Cloud has the advantage of being backed by one of the companies that has had the highest growth in recent years: Amazon. That gives us security and has been the main reason for us to trust this product. We believe that the security systems of this company are good enough to be quiet while our files are stored on their servers
Unitrends is our primary backup solution here at my place of employment, and I have no complaints. It does on-prem backups to a storage pool and with that, we chose not to also use Unitrends could storage as the cost was pretty high. Crashplan has a low cost and we were familiar with it. We found a great fit for Crashplan at a remote office with a web server, file share server, and a Domain Controller in addition to the Unitrends solution there. I also set up CrashPlan for a nonprofit org, as well as a Health foods store. I felt like I could stand behind the CrashPlan solution with my experience with it, in places like these where every dollar mattered.
Tremendous cost savings as the amount of data you backup doesn't impact cost. One flat rate!
Implementation time was minimal and requires little to no maintenance. Since installation, I've not had to correct or fix any issues. It just works.
We opted to supplement Code42 with another solution that allowed us to backup data to a local repository due to the amount for data that changes in our firm.
