{"id":4350,"date":"2012-11-01T10:40:13","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T14:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=4350"},"modified":"2012-11-01T10:40:13","modified_gmt":"2012-11-01T14:40:13","slug":"best-online-backup-service-is-still-backblaze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/01\/best-online-backup-service-is-still-backblaze\/","title":{"rendered":"Best online backup service is still BackBlaze?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Folks: Seven months ago I posted a question about Carbonite<\/a>. It seems that the secret to their “unlimited” backup is that they throttle upload speed to about 1 GB per day so that it will take 5.5 years for a standard 2 TB hard drive to get backed up. A person who creates a modest amount of digital content every week, e.g., by photographing and videotaping a child, will find that his or her data are never backed up completely. In the comments to that posting, a lot of people recommended Backblaze<\/a>. Is that still everyone’s favorite? They say that they offer “Unthrottled backups”, which means potentially as fast as 20-80 GB per day on a standard home Internet connection (cable modem or FiOS).<\/p>\n

I can’t find any fine print on the Backblaze site that makes the service useless. In addition to their secret upload throttling, Carbonite has some fine print that excludes video files, such as MPEGs (e.g., the ones a parent might make of a child!), by default but Backblaze does not seem to.<\/p>\n

[Separately, Carbonite never did manage to fix their software to stop growing 25+GB log files on my C: drive, a small SSD.]<\/p>\n

[Update 11\/15\/2012: Based on the comments below, I installed CrashPlan. It is uploading 2.2 Mbps currently, maxing out the admittedly feeble Comcast cable modem upload capacity. So this makes it 22 times faster than Carbonite, throttled to 100 kbps.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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