Being suddenly quite paranoid about all my data being either stolen or damaged in a flood or fire I decided to look at the best cloud backup options. I narrowed it down to what seem to be the two favourites in the market:
CrashPlan and Carbonite
Crashplan+ wins with its unlimited, encrypted file storage, up to 10 computers, constant live backup, external hard drive backup all for $6 per month or $120 for the year.
Comparatively Carbonite Home Premier is $149 for the year for just one computer, doesn’t backup external hard drives and isn’t Mac compatible (only the Home edition is).
After getting Crashplan+ all set up (very easy) and choosing my necessary files and folders on both my Mac’s hard drive and my external drives I let it start to do it’s thing… However the estimated time to back-up around 1TB of data said something crazy like 3 or 4 months! So I changed it to my most crucial data – photos and videos. It still estimated more than two weeks but it runs in the background and you can set it to speed up when you are away from your machine.
It’s also worth mentioning they have an app that allows you to remotely view your files and do everything from watch videos, work on documents to uploading photos to Facebook.