CrashPlan vs. Veeam Backup for Azure

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.

For our purposes I can't particularly find any shortcomings of Veeam Backup for Azure. It has been working well for our needs for a few years now. Maybe for someone with a larger cloud footprint or more complex needs, or maybe someone who wants to be able to deploy and configure the appliance using infrastructure as code it may not be as practical.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Reduce storage costs and minimizing the impact on network consuption.
• Veaam Backup for Azure provides application-aware backups for Microsoft SQL Server, ensuring that our data is backed up and available for recovery correctly.
• Replication: Veeam Backup for Azure helps us to replicate our workloads to another Azure region or on-premises environment for disaster recovery purposes and compliance needs.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Documentation around service account permissions was a little sparse when we implemented it
• It's sometimes hard to get the reason behind a (rare) job failure without going into logs
• The UI around snapshots and backups could do with some clarity around the restore points that will be available

Incentivized

No other product works as well.

Plainly, the product just works. I don't have to babysit it.

Incentivized

Overall, it is simple to use, lightweight, and effective.

Incentivized

It was so easy that you thought it wasn't working. Once you saw data and was able to recover it or do a restore with the product those beliefs in the system went to the roof. Once you get a product that does everything you want it to do, you will give it it's props.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Great support team!

Incentivized

Very easy to follow the install guide.

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.

Incentivized

Backup Exec was a very clunky application and took forever to backup to and restore from. We would backup to SSD external hard drives from a flash array, but the process still took forever to finish. Sending our data to the Azure blob storage via Veeam is a faster and more secure process than saving to the external hard drives with Backup Exec.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We have had fast recovery of documents when needed; sub 10 minutes from start of restore to complete and in the users hands
• Easily a value add for backing up files outside of the given Microsoft retention period; piece of mind
• Easy tool to use with minimal training required to use it and set up backups
• When you do change your cloud licensing it does require manual intervention to update backup data requirements. if the business makes changes then your backup person may not know to make these changes

Incentivized