Backblaze, headquartered in San Mateo, provides cloud storage and online backup, boasting trust with over an exabyte of data from customers in 175 countries. A backup service specialist, Backblaze describes their B2 cloud object storage service as S3 compatible and purpose built to provide simplicity, reliability, and affordability. B2 Cloud Storage is available at $0.005/GB/Month, with single-tier pricing.
$6
per month per TB
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.
$2.99
per month
Pricing
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
CrashPlan
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
CrashPlan Essential
$2.99
per month
CrashPlan Professional
$88
per year
CrashPlan Enterprise
$108
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
CrashPlan
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Two pricing models are available: consumption-based pay-as-you-go, and capacity-based storage bundles.
Pay-as-you-go consumption-based cloud storage costs $6/TB per month, with your first 10GB free. Egress is free up to 3x of average monthly data stored, and unlimited to many leading content delivery network (CDN) and compute partners.
Capacity-based storage, called B2 Reserve, is designed for companies looking for all-inclusive pricing on a single invoice. Storage bundles start at 20TB and can be purchased for one, two, or three years. Egress is always free.
Providing the option of purchasing a much longer archive if desired or limiting the length of time in maintaining what's been saved is brilliant. It makes all the sense in the world. At the very least, unless the retention period is clearly mandated somehow, it causes a decision maker (especially a small business owner) to think strategically about what the storage needs truly are.
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.
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.
Because they continuously had times they required updating the account and there were hiccups when that happened, over time, I became skeptical of their ability to keep my files secure. They were the first cloud backup storage company I had ever used and I stayed with them for almost two decades. Then it happened that we did have to do a recovery two different times because of hardware failures. It was anything but a smooth or complete recovery, and their price kept rising as their service declined. Hundreds of files were totally lost in the process. I guessed that among their strategies, it might well have been a re-focus on their part to build up their enterprise accounts and didn't seem to care about small business. I finally had enough and left them as a client.
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.
We haven't had any data loss situations yet, however I'm sure our ROI will be fairly high if we have to recover any data. Backblaze is in the insurance industry, not storage.
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.
