And the winner is . . . BackBlaze

After my recent hard drive failure, which ended happily with the successful restoration of my files from my Time Machine backups, I decided to get serious about backing up and look into some off-site, online solutions as a secondary backup in case of some worst-case scenario (e.g. fire, flood, theft–it hurts to even type those words!).

I read up on every web-based backup plan I could find and tried out several of them on my own machine. Most of the online backup services have a lot of features in common. Many of them offer “unlimited” storage, meaning they’ll mirror everything on your drive (except, generally, system files and application files). But these are generally mirrors, not archives. So, if you delete a local file, it will eventually (generally, after 30 days) be deleted from the backup as well. Most of them run about $50/year if you pay annually. There are some metered services out there, but I prefer a fixed cost, so long as it’s reasonable.

I eliminated Mozy pretty quickly because I read far too many comments about people being unable to restore files they had previously backed up (which is worse, when you think about it, than having no backup at all). I disliked CrashPlan‘s GUI, so I pitched it fairly quickly (and, as an added bonus, the uninstaller is like something right out of the 1980s). Apple’s MobleMe iDisk is pretty slick, but as it only allows 20GB of storage, it’s about twice as expensive as the other options.

At first, I was pretty happy with Carbonite. I tested that one out for nearly two weeks and I liked quite a few things about it. The interface is nice (it installs as a system preferences pane with an associated menu bar icon). But there were were a few problems:

• Video files are excluded by default. You have to opt them in one-by-one. I don’t need new maintenance items on my to do list; I need a set-it-and-forget-it solution. This was a big issue for me.
• They pay Rush Limbaugh to pimp their service. That fact alone doesn’t mean its a bad service, but it does mean that of my money would be going in that lying, hate monger’s pockets, and I can’t abide that.
• Connected drives (i.e. USB2 drives and the like) and networked drives are excluded, and there’s no way to opt them in. This isn’t a problem at present, but it will be eventually.

Then I discovered BackBlaze, which seems to give me everything Carbonite did, and more:

• The interface is nice. It installs as a System Preferences pane with an associated menu bar icon.
• Video files are included by default. In fact, all files except operating system files, application files, and temporary files are included by default. You can exclude any file or directory you like. Otherwise, it grabs everything.
• File restoration is accomplished via the BackBlaze web site. You log in, select the files you want to restore, and click go. A few minutes later, you get an email with a link to the zipped version of your files. The directory structure is maintained. This means that, once your files are backed up, you can use BackBlaze to nab a copy of a file from their site to your current location, even if that’s a different machine running a different operating system.
• Connected drives are included. There are a few caveats: they have to be present at least once every thirty days or BackBlaze will think they’re deleted and delete the backups associated with them. Time Machine drives aren’t eligible and neither are networked drives.
• Estimates how long it will take your backup to complete and has a throttle control so you can devote more of your bandwidth to speed up the process.
• Can, for an additional fee, copy your backups (up to 400GB) to a USB2 drive and FedEx them to you. I hope I never need this feature, but it would be nice in an emergency.

BackBlaze, like several of the other online backup services, offers a free fifteen-day trial. That wasn’t long enough to back up my entire hard drive. But it was long enough to back up a wide variety of files, test out a few restores, read a few more reviews, and get familiar with the software settings. It was enough to convince me that $50/year wasn’t too much to pay for some added piece of mind.

I think using online backup as your only backup solution is a profoundly bad idea (but, if that’s all you have, it’s still a lot better than nothing.) USB2 drives and backup software are cheap. They also fail at a fairly high rate. But having a local backup is a good first step, and having a redundant remote backup is extra insurance, since all drives fail eventually.