I’ve been sitting on my offsite backup upgrade for a long while now and finally decided to pull the trigger this week. I’ve used MozyHome for many years but the Mozy rate hike 6 months back agitated me. Combine this with the fact that, for more money, I’m not even getting the amount of backup I used to get and it was clearly time to move on, even though I’m nowhere near the 18 billion Gigabytes of storage Mozy claims I’m using.
I looked at some side-by-side reviews of home backup products and found that gigaom had the most useful reviews. Their original review, which was done in 2009, compared the two top contenders at that point in time: MozyHome and Carbonite. I’ve included the link more for completeness at this point since these I wasn’t really interested in these two players. Gigaom’s review of upstart providers Backblaze and Crashplan was much more interesting and convinced me to go with Crashplan as my new backup provider (bye, bye Mozy). I’ve always been interested in Crashplan’s unique peer-to-peer backup option. With their unlimited offsite backup now being extremely price competitive and with an optional family plan, Crashplan has all the features I’m looking for.
For local backups, Apple TimeMachine to an external drive has always worked extremely well for me. However, Scott Hanselman’s recent podcast on Network Attached Storage (NAS) has left me wanting a Synology NAS device. Check out the NAS product features on Synology’s site and the incredible reviews of their products on Amazon.com. Some of the killer features that caught my eye include:
- Hybrid RAID and easy storage expansion
- Backup to Amazon S3
- Built In FTP and WebDAV
- Surveillance and IP Camera Recording (How Logical Is That?)
- Apple TimeMachine Support
- Mobile Device Support
- Ability to Function as an iTunes Server