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I've been a satisfied user of CrashPlan for cloud backups of my family's computers for many years, but now that Code42 is discontinuing CrashPlan Home in favor of their business-oriented offerings, I now find myself in need of a new home backup solution.

Unfortunately, neither of their suggested replacements appear to fit my use case, as Carbonite only supports Windows & Mac (not Linux) and CrashPlan Business uses a per-device subscription model that would drastically increase the price. Our current cost for CrashPlan Home is ~$12.50/month, so I'm looking for alternatives in a similar price range.

Any solution would have to support:

  • Backups for two Windows machines (one laptop, one desktop) and one Linux desktop/server.
    • CLI is fine for Linux, but a GUI is preferred on Windows.
  • Cloud storage for >250GB of data.
    • Unlimited storage would be best, and encryption is preferred but not mandatory. A "cloudless" solution would not be sufficient as I'm aiming for an off-site backup in case of house fire, etc.

Ideal solutions would also provide:

  • Support for local backup to external drive or NAS.
  • Retention of file history.
    • Unlimited history is not necessary, but something like a 30-day rolling window would be nice.
  • Configuration for both idle and scheduled backups.
    • I currently run nightly backups for the Linux server, but continuous/idle backups on the Windows machines.
  • Controls for limits on bandwidth usage.
  • Reputation for reliability.
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  • Unless it's a typographical error, it's great to see that it will be more than a year before the termination of the free service. A friend received an email with the same notification and same termination date, which reduces the chance it's an error.
    – fred_dot_u
    Aug 23, 2017 at 14:27
  • @fred_dot_u It depends on your subscription period. My email said To allow you time to transition to a new backup solution, we've extended your subscription (at no cost to you) by 60 days. Your new subscription expiration date is 31 Oct 2017.
    – user416
    Aug 27, 2017 at 16:12

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I have chosen Cloudberry backup, storing my data with Amazon Glacier. Glacier is designed to back up large amounts of data that you do not need to retrieve often, so perfect for backups.
I have tested backup and restore on a Win7 machine.

Costs:

  • The Pro version costs $29.99 ex VAT (€33,72 incl VAT) per computer, with one year of upgrades, and an additional 20% annual maintenance fee if you want to keep receiving upgrades (you don't have to).
  • Amazon Glacier: Storage $0.004 per GB/month (varies slightly with region), retrieval $0.0025 per GB to $0.03 per GB, and $0.025 per 1,000 requests to $0,01 per request, depending on retrieval type:

Expedited: for those who are willing to spend a little more for higher speeds. You can get you data in as little as 1 to 5 minutes.
Bulk: for those who want to limit expenses by sacrificing access time. It is perfect for planned or non-urgent cases, with retrieval taking anywhere from 5 to 12 hours.
Standard: the option with retrieval typical in 3 to 5 hours.

My initial upload and tests (including that expensive Expedited retrieval) cost me $5.88.

A warning about costs (added after using this product for over a month):
I had configured CloudBerry to run continuously on both me and my wife's computer. This resulted in 150000 requests to the shared AWS Glacier account, costing $10 in the first full month.
We are setting the backup frequency back to every couple of hours now ;-)

Cloudberry Backup has lots of features:

  • Windows, Mac, Linux
  • Many cloud providers (Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Microsoft Azure, Google Drive, Google Cloud storage)
  • No proprietary data format and you can access your data using other Amazon tools. Supports all Amazon regions.
  • Versions that backup MS SQL Server, MS Exchange and Oracle backup (more expensive)
  • There's even a freeware version, but that's limited to 200 GB
  • Real time or scheduled backups
  • Local backup
  • Versioning. Option to purge locally deleted files from the cloud e.g. after 30 days
  • Optional compression and full encryption, nobody but you can see your file contents ('Trust no one'). You can even encrypt file names if you want.
  • Easy to install
  • Intuitive GUI; nicely multithreaded (I ran backups and restores together during testing)
  • Mail notifications (always or on errors), event log entries.
  • Bandwidth limitations

Note: There is a 1 TB storage limit, you can ask a quote for more

Here's the FAQ, here's the support page, and here's the documentation.

You reliability requirement is hard to answer. Crashplan looked reliable too, and then they pulled the plug. The Cloudberry software shows maturity, and they have been around for some time.

For completeness, here are alternatives I investigated and rejected:

Carbonite excludes a lot of file types by default. I have all kinds of files scattered all over my data partition and I do not want to spend the time reconfiguring all that and potentialy miss files. I just want to tell the software to back up D:\ with the exclusion of some folders that I determine I don't need backups for. I would need a 'Plus' subscription if I want video files I'm working on to be included. Carbonite costs $75 per person per device per year.

Before switching to Crashplan we were clients at Mozy backup. I have looked at them again. It would now cost $120/year for only 250 GB total on max 3 devices (on a personal plan), plus $2/months extra for each additional 20GB. That seems to be out of the data ranges you specify, as well as mine.

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