Dan Moren:
With the announcement this week that CrashPlan was discontinuing its consumer-oriented online backup plans, more than a few users found themselves wondering what steps to take to make sure their data remained safely and securely backed up.
There are, of course, plenty of options for Mac users who don’t want to switch to CrashPlan’s small business backup plans: Backblaze, Arq, and so on. But it also put into stark relief the fact that Mac users miss out on at least one major feature accorded to their iOS-using counterparts: iCloud Backup.
Terrific piece by Dan Moren. I would gladly pay a bit extra for the ability to include my Mac in my automatic iCloud device backup regimen.
I agree completely. I use Backblaze and it works, but restores are really clunky and insanely slow. I would love to have that TimeMachine simplicity with a cloud based backup.
Definitely a need here for those who want it. I’m sure Apple is keenly aware of this and working on a solution that’s practical and secure.
For many people, uploading terabytes of data to the cloud is an onerous task because their upload speeds are still in the dark ages of ISP technology. Maybe they could stop by their local Apple Store and make the initial backup there, leaving incremental backups to be done via FTP or similar.
No. I will never trust my data to a 3rd party. I bought an 8tb raid unit to store my data on. When you back up your data to a 3rd party server, they own your data.
When you encrypt it with an encryption key that the third party doesn’t have in their possession it just means that in 50 years they will own your data, but until/unless they brute-force that encryption key they own a black box that takes up space in their storage cluster.
When CrashPlan called it quits I just about said “good riddance”. I reinstalled several macs earlier this year. One of them has 2TB of stuff on it. After 6 weeks it was 67% complete and then all of sudden the backup reset itself to 40% completion (some kind of CrashPlan error). After 4 more weeks it was not yet back to 60% and I have 30Mbps upstream speeds with my internet service (telling me that CrashPlan did not have enough bandwidth on their end).
I decided that in the event of a catastrophic failure, my biggest concerns are photos, home videos, documents and whatever is on my desktop. iCloud does all of those things for me just by checking the iCloud Photo Library option and the “Documents and Desktop” option. It only took Apple 1 day to receive the documents and data from 5 macs and it only took 2 days to upload the many photos and home videos.
The way I see it, Time Machine locally + iCloud means I don’t need CrashPlan anyway. I uninstalled it from all my machines.
To back up the 1TB+ on my iMac I’d need the top tier of iCloud storage. That’s more expensive than the unlimited storage with Backblaze and should the worst happen Backblaze will ship me a HDD with my data on it, which would get me up and running far quicker than downloading all that data from iCloud.
It should probably be an option though, especially for people with laptops and smaller amounts of data to back up,
iOS can’t backup to a 3rd party though, can it?
And while it’s not true backup as BC2009 points out, you already have cloud storage for your Documents, Desktop and for Photos.
Want a real backup? Why does Apple need to do it? Go signup for Backblaze and be done with it. Want more control? Try Arq. Running to Apple to provide every service is just silly.
And when that array dies… you’re SOL. Don’t complain if that happens and you lose everything.
What about a catastrophic event, life fire or natural disaster. Or a theft. A remote backup is essential to data security.
What about a catastrophic event, life fire or natural disaster. Or a theft. A remote backup is essential to data security.
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In many ways we already have iCloud backups for the Mac.
iCloud Photo Library
Documents and Downloads auto syncing to iCloud Drive
iCloud music library
And so on.
True it doesn’t save apps but it doesn’t do that on iOS either.
But what if that event is where the remote servers are? I mean for all we know iCloud is in Houston and could have been destroyed during the Hurricane. So a local backup along with your remote backup is the best plan.
Yes, I back up locally and remotely. But remote services have multiple locations and redundancy to avoid location specific-redundancy.