About 3 months ago, my Mac did the impossible. It crashed. I don’t think my wife has forgiven me for some pictures of hers that are sitting on a crashed HD on the shelf. I had the idea in my head that Macs don’t do those things. I have since forgiven my iMac for doing that to me. She has been pretty good. About 4 months before the crash I stopped using Mozy.com for my automatic online backup. I did it for a few reasons. 
1. It felt like my data was going into some magical land that I could only imagine.
2. I couldn’t put a face or impression in my mind of where it was going.
3. Tonz of other competitors were sprucing up and they had some cool features.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked Mozy. They were my first love. People always remember their first loves don’t they?
Now I’m onto my next love and this one is here to stay. Her name is CrashPlan.com .
CrashPlan is pretty insane. You can actually see where there storage is. Pictures do a lot for me. At least I can beleive that those pics are legit. They have the yearly option which is what I like. They also let you have a free 30 days. Hopefully I can back up what I want before that time is up! Here’s the killer part that I think has it’s pros and cons. You can back up your files to a friends machine…. it’s much faster and you can retrieve your info faster if it ever crashed. While I don’t know that firends have enough space to be willing to “lend” the idea is still creative and provides an option to those who would actually do it.
Anyways don’t judge the pic I put up when it says 3.1 months remaining. That number changes all the time. At nights my upload speed is over 1000% faster on my settings.
3 Comments
dornquast
on 25th May, 09 11:05am
Hi Jay,
Thanks for sharing the love! The idea behind backing up to a friend is you can get insane amounts of storage for basically the cost of a drive. Each of you goes and gets a 1TB drive ($80 or so each) .. Then you attach the drive to your mac(s), back up directly to the drive, then put the drive over at your friend’s place.
Instantly, you have 1TB offsite of storage with no monthly fees. It is a bit of a hassle, but that would cost you $1K/Year using us.
The other thing that’s cool is if you loose your computer, you can drive over to friends house and grab your drive / restore over USB/Firewire instead of Internet.. MUCH faster.
re>3.1 months. Agreed
Our estimates are worst case scenario and change frequently. We should alter the code to make it more realistic/optimistic.
Jay Leishman
on 31st May, 09 12:05am
You make a good point about the $80 Tb drive… hopefully my friend has extra ports to plug into. Can you explain how 1tb offsite would cost me 1k a year?
dornquast
on 15th Jun, 09 01:06pm
$1k / year is an estimate based on my experience with what online storage providers charge. Amazon S3, CrashPlan, etc. (Swapdrive charges $2,800 for only 10GB! That’s insane.)
The main point isn’t actually cost – it’s practicality. To send 1TB over the internet would take a very long time (months) on your average connection. More importantly, it would take a long time (weeks) to get it back over the internet.
If it’s offsite nearby, you drive over, and restore directly from drive. MUCH faster, without the monthly costs.
If you don’t have very much data (<50GB) , I have room at my house on my drobo – you’re more than welcome to backup there for free.