CrashPlan

Mostly the price is what drew me to CrashPlan -others I have used are expensive per GB storage and difficult to manage. Carbonite was costing $1000.00 a year for 1 server with 2 TB of data. CrashPlan helps keep down the cost and the client spends much less time paying me to monitor backups.

Both of the entries I put need a dedicated VM or physical server to be utilized. VEEAM can be installed as a VM or on a physical server, but Unitrends has a dedicated server needed as a purchased product in order to get the backups running. CrashPlan is a simple install on any machine or VM and can start backing up right away.

CrashPlan (in my specific case the CrashPlan Pro or CrashPlan for Small Business (there seems to be somewhat of an ongoing identity crisis with the products) is significantly lower overhead, in terms of cost and complexity, when compared to the other two products I have evaluated/used. The downsides are that it is also significantly less functional than the other products. CrashPlan is, as I have said a good value simple point solution.

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.

The main advantage that CrashPlan has on competing services is it's ability to back up network drives and keep your backup archives indefinitely. While Backblaze costs significantly less ($50/year/computer vs. $10/year/computer - or $120/year/computer), it does not have the ability to backup network drives and only keep backup archives for 30 days. For some clients, the additional cost of CrashPlan is well worth it. On the other hand, I would never recommend Carbonite, as it is both overpriced and under featured compared to CrashPlan and Backblaze.