Crashplan Proe Cracker
CrashPlan Crack offers you two backup options; the first is to use their data center, called CrashPlan Central. The second mode is to utilize a friend’s PC. The only thing that you need to do is install the program on their computer, connect to the net and utilize the code that the app shows. CrashPlan offers the most comprehensive online backup solution to hundreds of thousands of consumers and tens of thousands of businesses around the world. Our highly secure, automatic and continuous service provides our customers the peace of mind. 301 Moved Permanently. CrashPlan PROe goes beyond basic endpoint backup to easily, securely protect critical enterprise information in the most seamless way possible. The desktop client runs silently in the background, continuously protecting the critical business data stored on endpoints. CrashPlan for Small Business provides peace of mind through easy-to-use, unlimited automatic data backup and recovery. We help small businesses and organizations recover and bounce back faster. ITS Online CrashPlan PROe WebPortal The CrashPlan PROe web portal allows you to mange your backup devices, view backup statistics and restore (download) files from any of your backed up devices. CrashPlan is one of the few online backup services to offer unlimited storage space for business users, while still remaining affordable at $10 per computer. It comes with the same, easy-to-use interface as Code42’s home software, while adding powerful multi-user management capabilities.
CrashPlan has decided to focus entirely on its SMB customers with CrashPlan for Business; so far it seems to have paid off. Read our full review for a service that has its act together.
| Table of Contents | Rating | |
|---|---|---|
| Features | Very Good | |
| Pricing | Very Good | |
| Ease of Use | Good | |
| File Backup & Restoration | Good | |
| Speed | Good | |
| Security | Excellent | |
| Privacy | Excellent | |
| Support | Good | |
| User Reviews & Comments | ||
Very Good
CrashPlan for Small Business ranks among the best online backup for small business solutions available today. That’s thanks to its unlimited backup, great value, private encryption and some of the best versioning capabilities of any online backup service we’ve reviewed.
It has some downsides, though. CrashPlan can’t backup by file type, there’s no mobile app, there’s no courier-recovery service and no live support during nights or weekends.
If that doesn’t matter to you, stick with us as we go into details in this CrashPlan for Small Business review. If it does, consult our business online backup reviews for alternative services.
In 2017, CrashPlan discontinued its support for private backup. CrashPlan made the move to focus solely on its business customers. That was a rough deal for private users, but most have probably moved on to other services. If you’re looking for backup for private users, check out our best online backup services comparison.
Strengths:
- Unlimited backup
- Unlimited computers
- Backs up external drives
- Customizable versioning
- Retains deleted files indefinitely
- Live chat & telephone support
Weaknesses:
- Doesn’t backup by file type
- No mobile app
- No multi-threaded backups
- No courier recovery
- No live support on nights or weekends
Alternatives for CrashPlan for Small Business
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- CrashPlan for Small Business
www.crashplan.com - $1000/month
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- Server Backup
CrashPlan for Small Businesses is similar to other services from our online backup reviews, meaning that it can backup your computers and other devices, keeping you safe from losses caused by hard drive crashes or other software glitches. What sets CrashPlan apart, though, is that it provides true unlimited backup.
There’s no cap when you get to 10TB of data and no file-size limits. The only limitations are a few files in certain system folders that CrashPlan won’t protect. Competitors such as IDrive Business and Carbonite for Business limit you to 250GB with their initial plans and require you to pay a fee to add more storage capacity.
The downside of CrashPlan’s approach is that it only lets you backup one computer, while Carbonite and IDrive can backup unlimited computers. You can, however, add additional computers to your backup plan for a fee. More about that in the next section.
Plus, CrashPlan’s subscription lets you backup as many external drives as you want, and that includes NAS backup, at least if you’re using macOS or Linux. If you’re a Windows user, you won’t be able to backup your NAS devices due to an operating system-level restriction built into Windows.
CrashPlan can also backup your servers, but it can’t do image-based backups of your computers. For that, you need to consult our best image-based backup and cloning software roundup.
CrashPlan Core Features
The features we’ve mentioned up to now aren’t basic features, so it’s not surprising that some of them are missing from CrashPlan’s arsenal. That said, CrashPlan includes all the basic online backup features we’d expect to see when we evaluate a service.
This includes scheduled backup, continuous backup, incremental backup, backup to local drives, deduplication, file compression, speed throttling, email notifications and block-level file copying.
Continuous backup is important because it enables you to tag a computer for backup and not worry about forgetting to add files for backup. Incremental backup fits well with it because it lets the process backup only the files that are added or modified, thus saving time and bandwidth.
Backing up to local drives qualifies CrashPlan as a hybrid backup, which means you can backup to both the cloud and your local drives, such as external drives. That makes it easier to implement the 3-2-1 backup rule.
CrashPlan Versioning
CrashPlan also provides file versioning, which lets you restore previous versions of files to avoid unwanted changes or file corruptions. Unlike many other cloud backup services, CrashPlan gives you the option to customize the versioning policy from the desktop client.
CrashPlan’s versioning isn’t exactly unlimited, but because you can indefinitely retain file versions based on 15-minute increments, it might as well be. CrashPlan also gives you the option to indefinitely keep deleted files, which is nice considering many online backup providers permanently remove files after 15 or 30 days.
CrashPlan grants essential business features, such as administrative access to monitor employee backups and even access their files.
Cloud security features, which we’ll cover in detail in another section below, include at-rest encryption, in-transit encryption and optional private encryption.
CrashPlan doesn’t miss a lot of features. However, besides its lackluster NAS support, CrashPlan doesn’t let you run multi-threaded backups to speed things up, as Backblaze does.
There isn’t a courier-recovery service, either.
Probably the biggest misses are the lack of mobile support and that CrashPlan backs up by file location rather than file type. If you need to backup your mobile devices, read our best online backup for mobile piece. We’ll talk more about backing up by location a little more in our ease-of-use section. You can learn more about business backup in our business backup library.
CrashPlan Features Overview
Pricing
To keep things simple, CrashPlan has only one pricing plan. It’s $10 per month per computer, and you get unlimited backup to work with. Unlimited backup is great because it means you and your employees don’t need to worry as much about what gets backed up and what doesn’t. This, in turn, helps you focus on the important aspects of your work.
It’s also easy to scale because CrashPlan makes it simple to add new computers to your backup plan. Because of this, CrashPlan charges per month, so there’s no annual subscription option. The upside is that you can cancel at any time. Before you subscribe, though, you can take advantage of the 30-day free trial to test the service.
CrashPlan for Business
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Keep in mind that, with this unlimited data subscription, you pay for the number of computers that CrashPlan sees as active in your administration console, no matter if they have backed up any data or not.
If you don’t want to pay for a device anymore, you can deactivate it in the CrashPlan for Small Business administration console. Once you do that, any existing backup data for that device will be deleted.
The pricing plan seems good when you compare it to, say, IDrive Business, which charges $74.62 per year for 250GB of backup for unlimited computers.
On a similar note, Carbonite can also backup 250GB of data across unlimited computers, but it costs $287.99 per year. You can gain more storage for $99 per additional 100GB. With that in mind, backing up 1TB of data on a single computer with Carbonite means you will have to pay around $900 per year, compared to $120 with CrashPlan.
Things don’t go so much in CrashPlan’s favor when we compare it to Backblaze for Business, which lets you backup unlimited data for just $6 per computer per month, or $60 per computer if you pay for a year in advance. You can learn more about this option in our Backblaze for Business review.
CrashPlan’s desktop client works on Windows, Mac and Linux. You’ll have to rely on the web client because CrashPlan doesn’t support mobile apps for Android and iOS anymore. The client takes only a couple of minutes to install, after which you’ll be asked to sign in.
That said, it’s not hard to use, but backup operations with CrashPlan could be simpler. CrashPlan backs up based on file location, which means you need to manually tag folders and files for backup. That takes more time and increase the chance that you’re going to forget to tag a file.
If CrashPlan backed up by file type, you wouldn’t have to worry about whether you’ve added your documents, images, videos and other files to your backup plan because everything would be protected. That’s how Backblaze and Carbonite work.
On top of that, CrashPlan doesn’t provide a tree structure, which makes it faster to tag files and folders. Instead, you have to browse through folders, which isn’t convenient.
The desktop client itself is well done and is intuitive enough, with “home,” “downloads” and “settings” buttons positioned along the top. The main pane of the window shows your online backup set. That is, the files and folders you selected for backup. You’ll also see your backup destination there.
Accessing CrashPlan while you’re away from your computer requires that you log in to CrashPlan’s web client. It also has account oversight features that let you check up on user statistics and monitor file restoration from a dashboard view.
There are also views that allow you to monitor and deactivate devices being backed up, add and deactivate users, download client apps and create reports to keep you on top of backup failures.
These managing features are an excellent addition for business owners. The only quibble we have is that the design doesn’t feel attractive and modern. However, that’s probably not so important for entrepreneurs who’d value good managing capabilities over looks.
File Backup & Restoration
As we mentioned, CrashPlan requires you to manually tag files and folders for backup. If you don’t want to backup certain file types, you can exclude them in the settings menu.
First, though, you’ll want to add a backup destination so CrashPlan knows where to backup your files. By default, this is CrashPlan’s cloud, but you can also select local drives as the destination for your backup.
The upside of that second approach is that you can restore data from local drives faster than from over the internet. By backing up to a local drive, you’ll also still be backing up to the cloud, which adds another layer of protection.
On top of that, CrashPlan can backup your external drives. You need to attach them via USB or FireWire to select them for backup, though. That said, you can’t do the same for NAS devices (if you need that read our best online backup for NAS article).
Once your backup plan is complete and your initial backup finishes, CrashPlan will run in continuous backup mode. We recommend that you let CrashPlan run in this mode because it will immediately upload the files that you add or change in the locations you’ve selected for backup.
That said, continuous backup can also use a lot of your system’s resources and impede other work. To mitigate that, you can limit how much processing power CrashPlan can use while you’re actively working on your computer.
You can also shut off continuous backup entirely and switch to scheduled backups. This lets you choose the times when backups start, and end, and on which days it may run.
However, in most cases, running continuous backup shouldn’t be a problem, so you should enable it to best protect your business files.
Restoring Files with CrashPlan
CrashPlan lets you use a couple of options to restore your files from its cloud. The first is to use your desktop client by hitting the “restore files” button. That will open a pop-up window that lets you navigate through your stored folders and files, then select what you’d like to restore from the server.
Once you select files to restore, you have several options that you can tweak before starting the restore process. You can restore files to their original location, “desktop,” or “downloads,” or you can select a specific destination. If a file already exists in that location, you can rewrite or rename the new one. Plus, you can grant original or current permissions to files.
The other restore options use CrashPlan’s web client. You need to navigate to the “devices” view and click the restore icon associated with the device you want to restore from. That lets you restore files to a computer that isn’t yours, without the need to download the CrashPlan client. Also, if you’re an admin, you can access files that other users have backed up.
Note that you can only restore up to 250MB using the web client, which means that for large restores, using the desktop client is your only option.
Because there’s no mobile app, you can’t access your files or initiate a restore process from it. There’s no courier recovery service, either. Courier recovery means that the provider could store your files onto a device and ship it to you. That would help with restores that range in hundreds of gigabytes.
Backing up your computer is smart, but it may take a long time. That time can stretch into days or weeks, depending on several factors including your ISP, the distance from CrashPlan’s servers in the U.S. and Australia, and how well your online backup service manages file transfers.
To test CrashPlan for Small Business’ upload and download speeds, we conducted several simple upload and download tests using a 1GB compressed folder made up of various file types. We did our tests using a WiFi connection out of Belgrade, Serbia, with an upload speed of 9.4 MB/s and a download speed of 44.19 MB/s.
| First attempt: | Second attempt: | Average: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upload time: | 00:36:12 | 00:35:58 | 00:36:05 |
| Download time: | 00:04:25 | 00:03:42 | 00:04:04 |
Uploading a 1GB folder via our connection took an average of 36 minutes and five seconds, which is much longer than the 15 minutes and 11 seconds it should take without any overhead.
The download speed was more in line with what we expected, though. It took an average of four minutes and four seconds, versus the expected three minutes and 14 seconds.
These aren’t the best results, but they’re not the worst either. For a service that’s much faster, read our Acronis True Image cloud review.
CrashPlan lets you throttle your file-transfer speeds to limit how much bandwidth the backup process uses. Plus, CrashPlan even allows you to tweak the client so that it increases speed when you’re away from your computer.
After the initial backup completes, subsequent backups should run faster thanks to the block-level file copying algorithm, which tags only the parts of the files that changed since the last backup or transfer to the cloud.
Security
CrashPlan for Small Business uses AES 256-bit encryption to scramble your data while at rest on its servers. This encryption takes place before your files leave your computer, but by default, CrashPlan will hold onto your encryption key for you. That ensures that the company can reset your password if you ever forget it.
However, it also means that malicious employees or hackers who gain access to the server that stores user credentials could browse through your intellectual property, reports and other business data.
If you’d like to ensure that won’t happen, you can set up a private encryption key from the security settings pane of the desktop client.
AES encryption is considered quite safe, and there have been no known hacks of it. In fact, it’s estimated that it would take a supercomputer billions of years to brute-force crack an AES key.
That can’t be said of your personal password, because encryption won’t protect your password and it’s easy to crack a weak one (see our password fails article to learn about the most common mistakes when creating a password). That’s why you should make sure you set up a strong password.
In addition to that, you should enable two-factor authentication, which helps protect your credentials. It does that by requiring you to enter a one-time code in addition to your login information when accessing CrashPlan from an unknown computer.
Versioning, a feature that we’ve mentioned before, also offers a measure of protection against ransomware, which is an increasing concern for businesses.
With versioning in play, you won’t have to pay ransom money for uncorrupted copies of your files. Instead, you can just revert to previous versions of your files once you’ve removed the malware that caused the issue.
In terms of data center security, CrashPlan employs 24/7 surveillance of its facilities in addition to other safeguards against intrusion. The facilities are also equipped to resist failure, whether from device malfunction, power outage, fire, earthquake or another disaster.
On top of that, Code42, CrashPlan’s parent company, is an ISO 27001-certified organization, and CrashPlan’s data centers undergo annual SOC 2 Type 2 authentication. Additionally, if you work with medical files and reports, you’ll be pleased to know that CrashPlan is HIPAA compliant.
To ensure maximum protection for your privacy, you should opt in for private encryption. That said, we’ve checked how Code42 handles your privacy.
CrashPlan collects the personal data you provide to it, which includes the information you enter on CrashPlan’s website or send electronically. It might include information such as your name, address, email or telephone. It also collects data when you attend one of CrashPlan’s events, during phone calls with sales representatives, or when you contact customer support.
On top of that, CrashPlan automatically collects data that may include the specific device you are using, operating system version, web browser software and your IP and MAC address.
CrashPlan also collects statistics on your activities on the website, information about how you came to and used the website, your country or city-level location, as well as other technical data collected through cookies, pixels and tags. CrashPlan also collects information about how your device has interacted with its website, including pages accessed and links clicked.
Data collected this way is called metadata, and most services use this to enhance their websites and backup services, so this is nothing out of the ordinary.
In addition, CrashPlan receives information from third parties. Examples of such information include contact information, event attendance, job role and public employment profile, and information about your product or service interests.
It also gets information about you from referrals or commercial lead sources. However, in that case, CrashPlan will send an email informing you that it has received your personal data, the type of data it received and the source, along with a link to its privacy statement.
CrashPlan Data Collection
CrashPlan collects data about you in several ways, but it’s open about it. Collecting information about you from third parties isn’t common, but at least CrashPlan will notify you about it in an email.
Sometimes the collected data could be identified with you. Code42 uses such personal data to provide products and services, as well as analyze the frequency, duration and types of usage of its website to improve user experience.
Plus, it uses it to update and expand its records with new information and analyze those records to identify potential customers by understanding your role in your organization. It can also contact you with tailored ads for products and services that may be of interest to you based on its previous experiences concerning customers with similar characteristics.
CrashPlan Data Sharing
Code42 only shares your personal data as-necessary to operate its business. It does not sell or share your information to others, except in certain cases. Those cases may involve Code42 affiliates that help it maintain its services. Those affiliates will process your personal data in accordance with Code42’s privacy statement.
It’s similar with business partners. Code42 shares your personal data with them to fulfill product and information requests. Plus, Code42 might share your information with companies and individuals that provide services on its behalf. They are prohibited from using personal data for any other purpose, though.
For a pure PostScript printer, you'd probably rather use >setpagedevice statements. So nowadays you can use PJL header lines for most printers which can print PostScript, PCLxx, HP/GL or PDF, because it is commonly supported by most vendors. See last-but-one paragraph above if you pre-fix your job with a PJL header. By a statement like: ESC%-12345X@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = PostScript 'If I do send Postscript, do I have to tell the printer somehow that it is Postscript somehow?' In this case the last PJL-line tells the printer what language the real job data is: PostScript, PCLxxx, PDF, HP/GL, whatever. Hpgl converter postscript books.
On top of that, Code42 shares personal data it holds in the event of business transfers, when required by law and with your consent, in which case you will receive a notice about it and be able to choose not to share that information. Also, any information you post on Code42’s community pages or blog is publicly available.
Code42 is headquartered in the United States, but it may sometimes transfer your data internationally. That’s done under the protection of the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. privacy shield.
If you are located in certain territories, such as the European Economic Area, you have these additional privacy rights:
- The right not to provide consent or to withdraw consent for certain personal data
- The right of access: You have the right to access your personal data
- The right of erasure: In certain circumstances, you have the right to the erasure of personal data
- The right to object to processing: You have the right to request that Code42 stop processing your personal data. It will do so if it is processing your personal data for marketing, or if it is relying on its legitimate interest to process your personal data, unless it demonstrates compelling legitimate grounds to continue the processing
- The right to data portability: You have the right to obtain the personal data that you consented to provide to Code 42 or that was provided to it to perform the contract with you
- The right to rectification: You have the right to require the correction of any inaccurate or incomplete personal data
- The right to restrict processing: You have the right to request the restriction of processing your personal data in certain circumstances
- The right to lodge a complaint with the data protection authority: If you have a concern about these privacy practices, including the way your personal data is handled, you can report it to the data protection authority that is authorized to hear those concerns
These rights ensure Code42’s compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, for short. The GDPR is the EU’s law that strengthens the privacy of user’s online data. On top of that, CrashPlan provides private encryption, and the privacy statement is clear about what data it collects, how it uses it and how it shares your data.
Support
You can contact CrashPlan’s support team via telephone, email and live chat. The presence of telephone and chat support should appeal to small business owners who need immediate support.
However, telephone support is available Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m to 7:00 p.m. CST. Chat support is available on the same days but from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. CST. If you encounter a problem during the night or the weekend, you’ll need to either wait, figure it out on your own or send an email request.
Email support is available 24/7. We’ve sent a request at 5:50 a.m. CST and received a response in four hours. Note, however, that we asked a simple question about the deduplication process. CrashPlan maintains a triage team that escalates more important tickets for faster responses.
If you’d like to get your hands dirty, you can hit the CrashPlan support site, which has articles for both CrashPlan for Small Business and Enterprise. Small Business articles include a guide for administrators, a user guide and FAQs. If you don’t find what you’re looking for there, you can use the search feature to find an answer.
CrashPlan also keeps a community page, which could be a good way of dealing with your issues. However, most topics are outdated and don’t have many replies. Overall, CrashPlan supplies a good deal of support, which should do the job for most business users.
CrashPlan for Small Business isn’t a perfect solution. Its biggest fault is that it doesn’t take advantage of its unlimited backup capacity to simplify the user experience with file-type rather than file-location backup. Plus, it doesn’t have a mobile app, which means you can’t use it to backup your mobile data or access your backup on the go.
There’s no courier-recovery service, either, and live support isn’t available during weekends and nights. Beyond those complaints, though, CrashPlan has a lot of upsides.
Unlimited storage that lets you backup everything you need for $10 per computer is a good deal. Private encryption helps protect your privacy, and CrashPlan also has some of the most powerful versioning and deleted-file retention setups of any online backup solution we’ve ever tested.
Overall, we feel that CrashPlan is a great service, despite some shortcomings. What are your thoughts about CrashPlan? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.
CrashPlan for Business Review
Unlimited backup for a decent price.
CrashPlan has decided to focus entirely on its SMB customers with CrashPlan for Business; so far it seems to have paid off. Read our full review for a service that has its act together.If you’re trying to decide whether CrashPlan or Carbonite is the best online backup for business decision for you, you’ve landed in the right place. During this head-to-head review, we’ll examine these longtime disaster recovery rivals round by round before picking a winner.
We’ll compare the costs, then turn our attention to the backup and restore processes of each. Then, we’ll finish up with a look at security and support. It’s going to be a bit divisive, we’re sure, but we think we’ve landed on a clear winner for most of the small business owners out there: CrashPlan, though Carbonite comes close.
If neither service meets your needs, don’t fret: we have a full collection of online backup reviews for you to peruse. We’ve also put together a number of other business backup comparisons for your consideration, including a CrashPlan vs IDrive review and one for CrashPlan vs Backblaze.
Of course, we also have a complete CrashPlan for Small Business review and a Carbonite for Office review that you can check out, too.
The Battle: CrashPlan for Small Business vs Carbonite Safe Pro
While neither CrashPlan nor Carbonite are the fastest or even most feature-packed backup tools for businesses on the market, both are capable services that are easy to use and provide good value relative to more expensive options out there.
CrashPlan, for its part, now devotes its entire infrastructure to disaster recovery for businesses, having ditched its personal online backup solution in 2017 (to some dismay). While Carbonite has a personal plan available that ranks among the best unlimited online backup tools, its business plans are a compelling alternative to CrashPlan for Small Business, at least on paper.
Up next, we’ll look at each service over the course of five rounds, as promised: price plans, backup process, restore process, security and support. After each round, we’ll declare a winner, then sum up our findings to crown an overall backup champion.
- 1
- Carbonite Safe Pro
www.carbonite.com - /month
- Continuous Backup
- Incremental Backup
- External Drive Backup
- NAS Backup
- Server Backup
- 2
- CrashPlan for Small Business
www.crashplan.com - /month
- Continuous Backup
- Incremental Backup
- External Drive Backup
- NAS Backup
- Server Backup
Price Plans
Bottom line isn’t everything in backup, but for SMBs looking to limit expenses, it’s pretty critical. On that note, up first we’ll evaluate value by reviewing the price plan costs of CrashPlan and Carbonite relative to the total amount of storage and supported devices.
CrashPlan for Small Business
CrashPlan makes things pretty simple when it comes to picking a plan for your business: there’s only one. It’s a good deal, too, with unlimited backup space for just $10 per month.
CrashPlan for Business
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The plan is called CrashPlan for Small Business but the name itself is something of a relic left over from the days when the company also offered an unlimited backup plan for personal use, too. (If that’s your need, Backblaze has $5 a month unlimited plan for home use.)
While great value for those without terabytes of data to backup, a single subscription is only good for one computer, and CrashPlan doesn’t have discounts for purchasing protection for multiple employees. It also doesn’t provide smartphone backup, like those services in our best backup for mobile article.
On the other hand, you can attach as many external drives as you want to your computer and add those to your backup plan at no additional cost. That doesn’t include NAS devices but its still useful for those with stacks of HDDs to protect.
The plan itself doesn’t impose any file-size restrictions, either, and CrashPlan claims not to throttle your bandwidth if you upload too much data (translation: feel free to go nuts).
We recommend giving the free trial a spin before committing, although you can cancel anytime you like after signing up. The trial is good for one month and like the subscription, it’s unlimited.
Carbonite Safe Pro
While Carbonite’s personal use plan is unlimited, its business options aren’t. They’re also not nearly as affordable.
Basic
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Plus
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Prime
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There are three Carbonite Safe plans available for businesses: Pro, Power and Ultimate. Each can be used to backup unlimited computers. Carbonite Safe Power also lets you backup one server, while Ultimate includes unlimited server backup.
While we love the unlimited computer backup, the problem with Carbonite is that you don’t get much cloud space for your money. A Carbonite Safe Pro subscription, in fact, comes with just 250 GB of backup for around $270 per year. That works out to over $20 a month.
You can add more backup if that’s not enough, which it’s likely not going to be for more than two or three computers. However, each additional 100GB of backup will cost you another $100 per year.
Subscriptions also have to be paid for annually, so you’re stuck with the cost if you decide to take your business elsewhere. Make sure you take advantage of the 30-day trial before locking yourself in.
Round One Thoughts
If stuck choosing between CrashPlan for Small Business and a Carbonite Safe plan, many businesses would have no choice to go with Carbonite due to the fact that its Power and Ultimate plans include server backup. However, there are many other server backup options out there like those in our best server backup guide that are better, overall.
When it comes to affordable computer backup for your business, we have to give a strong nod to CrashPlan. $10 a month for unlimited backup is a much better deal than $22 a month for 250GB, and CrashPlan doesn’t lock you into a one-year commitment.
Backup Process
Next, we’ll introduce you to the basic backup features and processes for CrashPlan and Carbonite, and figure out which provides the best combination of convenience and features.
CrashPlan for Small Business
Backup with CrashPlan isn’t quite as easy as using unlimited rival Backblaze, but the overall experience is still satisfyingly simple. To create a backup plan, you’ll use the desktop client to tag objects in your file system for backup.
Click on “backup” in the navigation options down the left side of the client, then click the “change” button under “files.” You’ll be able to select both folders and files for backup.
We recommend backing up at the folder level, then excluding files you don’t want to be backed up later. You can actually exclude by file type if you want to skip over system, temporary files and the like.
You’ll also be able to set a backup destination. While the destination is the CrashPlan cloud by default, you can backup to external drives if you’re looking to implement both cloud and local backup, which is recommended if you subscribe to the 3-2-1 backup school of thought (and you should).
The CrashPlan for Small Business client runs continuous backup, meaning files are protected in near real-time when new files are added or existing files changed. If you prefer less regular backups, you can make use of the client’s scheduling features to restrict operations to certain hours or certain days.
However, in general, you should be fine running with continuous backup since, in order to conserve bandwidth, only the delta of altered files gets copied over to the cloud rather than the entire file (if that was Greek to you, check out our block-level sync article to find out what we’re talking about).
On a final note, CrashPlan compresses files by default. Generally, compression is used to decrease file space in the cloud, however with CrashPlan that shouldn’t be a problem for you (because unlimited).
CrashPlan states that the compression process also speeds up your backup and that it’s lossless, meaning it won’t degrade your files in any way. However, in our experience compression more often tends to slow a backup down. We’d recommend shutting it off if you’re experiencing slow uploads to see if that helps move things along.
Carbonite Safe Pro
In many ways, setting up backup plans with Carbonite entails much less work than CrashPlan. That’s because it takes the Backblaze approach of scanning your computer and backing up all files of a certain type, including documents, images, videos, emails and most other common file types.
While we like that approach for unlimited backup, Carbonite caps your total data, which can make simply grabbing everything a terrible approach, especially if you have multiple employee computers attached to your account.
If that’s a problem, you can login into the Carbonite browser interface and create backup policies that can be applied to computers on your account, restricting backup to certain folders and file types.
In fact, you might want to tweak it anyway since Carbonite has a default policy in place that restricts backup to the desktop folder, documents folder, Outlook data folder, my pictures folder, my music folder and my videos folder (on Windows). Temporary and system files are also excluded by default.
Backups run continuously with Carbonite Safe to help keep your drives protected in near real-time, but you can opt out if you want to only backup once a day or disable backup during certain hours.
Carbonite only backs up the changed parts of edited files, like CrashPlan, so it should run pretty efficiently without disabling continuous backup. Carbonite also compresses files using what the company states is lossless zlib compression. There’s no option to turn it off.
Round Two Thoughts
The biggest problem most people will have backing up their files is the same for both CrashPlan and Carbonite: speed. While that’s not a huge issue once you complete your initial backup process, getting over that hump will test your patience.
We’ve tested both services, and in both cases, it took us well over an hour to backup a gigabyte worth of files. If you have 500GB of files to backup, you’d be looking at probably close to a month to complete the initial stage.
You can read our general article about expectations for backup speed to learn more regarding impacting factors, but the central issue with both services seems to be an absence of much infrastructure.
If backup speeds are a big concern, consider a service with multiple data centers around the world, instead, like Rackspace Cloud Files. (Paired with CloudBerry Backup to manage the backup process, of course, as detailed in our getting started with Rackspace guide.)
On to the matter at hand, we’re giving round two to Carbonite. The use of file-type backup combined with file-location backup, in addition to the ability to create backup policies, makes it easy to design complete backup plans.
Restore Process
Just as important as getting your files into the cloud is being able to quickly and easily get them back when disaster strikes. With that in mind, round three is all about file restoration.
CrashPlan for Small Business
You can restore backup files directly from the desktop client by clicking on the “restore” tab. A file tree will let you check and uncheck folders and files. When you’re ready to restore, just click the “restore” button near the bottom of the screen.
Crashplan Pro Console
You can also restore past versions of files. CrashPlan can be set to save every version of every file, which is useful for both rollbacking unwanted changes and file corruptions. Because you get unlimited backup space with CrashPlan, there’s no harm going with unlimited versioning, either.
CrashPlan will also let you restore files to their original location automatically or download a .zip file to your hard drive to work with manually.
In addition to the desktop client, you can access files from the CrashPlan browser interface and mobile apps for Android and iOS. This provides a convenient means of getting at files on the road and on computers that don’t belong to you.
Carbonite Safe Pro
Carbonite also supports file recovery directly from the desktop client. However, it’s only for recovering everything at once. There’s an option to recover individual files, too, but it’ll redirect you to the browser interface to manage the recovery process.
When recovering all of your files using the desktop client, you can choose to recover everything back to its original location or download a .zip file.
Web restores let you select content to download by checking the box next to it. There’s no option to restore individual files to their original location, so you’ll have to handle that part on your own.
Carbonite also has mobile apps for Android and iOS that you can use to access your files. By default, Carbonite always retains at least three versions of files backed up on Windows computers. However, versioning isn’t offered for the Mac client for some reason.
Round Three Thoughts
There’s really not much to separate the restore process between CrashPlan and Carbonite. Both are relatively easy to use, have good versioning capabilities (unless you’re a Carbonite Mac user) and let you restore files to either their original locations or download them in a zip file. Both also have smartphone apps to access your files from.
CrashPlan, however, offers a more flexibility. For one, you can restore individual files to their original location, while Carbonite only lets you do so if recovering your entire backup. Also, Carbonite forces you to recover individual files via the browser GUI, while with CrashPlan you can do so using the desktop client, too.
Security
The security of files stored in the cloud is always a big deal, especially for business users. Next up we’ll cover the encryption options and everything else you’ll want to know about before letting either company safeguard your files.
CrashPlan for Small Business
When you send files to CrashPlan for backup, they’re encrypted end-to-end. That means your files are rendered unreadable before leaving your computer and don’t get put back together until you recover them. In transit, they’re also protected using transport-layer security (TLS).
By default, CrashPlan manages the encryption keys for you, which allows the company to reset your password if you forget it. However, it also means your files could be decrypted either by the company through the request of law enforcement, or by someone who steals those keys from the CrashPlan server (breaches are usually inside jobs).
To secure against those possibilities, CrashPlan has an option for private encryption that you can and should enable. Doing so means that only you can decrypt your files.
The encryption protocol used by CrashPlan is AES, which is the same protocol used by most other cloud providers, most banks, and most government organizations. The level of AES used is 256 bit, which with present technology would take many billions of years to crack through with brute force.
We mentioned versioning earlier, but it’s worth mentioning again here as this feature lets you potentially undo the damage caused by ransomware programs like CryptoLocker and CryptoWall. Once you remove the offending malware, just rollback corrupted files to clean copies, and you should be good to resume business without having to shell out thousands of dollars.
One big miss with CrashPlan is two-factor authentication (2FA). By not including this feature, stolen passwords are much easier to use since no additional security clearance will be required for logging into your account on unfamiliar machines.
If you’re sold on CrashPlan except for the absence of 2FA, the good news is that the service is compatible with many single-sign-on (SSO) services like OneLogin. Setting up the integration will cost you more money but will give you more control over user passwords, minimize phishing opportunities and let you enable 2FA.
SSO use also decreases user password fatigue by letting your workforce use the same credentials for multiple tools, including many of those services mentioned in our best enterprise sync and share guide.
Carbonite Safe Pro
Carbonite takes most of the same steps as CrashPlan in keeping your files secure. Files kept server-side are encrypted using AES and protected in transit with TLS. The encryption is end-to-end, though not private by default.
If you prefer to keep your encryption keys to yourself and not let the company manage them, you can enable private encryption. However, you have to do so prior to your initial backup; if you change your mind and want to add 2FA later, you’ll need to backup all of your files again.
Of less concern is that Carbonite uses 128-bit AES instead of 256-bit. That’s not nearly as secure a cipher but only relatively speaking. It would still take billions of years to crack, just not as many billions.
Carbonite, like CrashPlan, also has a deep versioning feature as we noted earlier. Like CrashPlan, that makes it helpful for rolling back file corruptions caused by ransomware, which could otherwise sink your business.
Where CrashPlan misses, Carbonite hits by allowing users to enable 2FA. When logging into your account from an unfamiliar machine, you’ll be required to enter a security code sent via text. As long as whoever stole your password doesn’t also snag your smartphone, your files should be safe.
Carbonite also supports SSO integrations if you’d prefer more oversight regarding your employee passwords.
Round Four Thoughts
We have no qualms about recommending either service from a security standpoint, and that’s mostly thanks to the inclusion of private end-to-end encryption and powerful versioning features. However, the absence of two-factor authentication will rightfully dissuade some business owners from choosing CrashPlan to protect their hard drives.
In light of that, we’re giving round four to Carbonite.
Support
With our battle tied at two rounds each, this final round is for all the marbles, and for this final round, we’ll be covering support. Finding responsive and reliable help when needed is a critical concern for businesses dealing with disaster recovery.
CrashPlan for Small Business
We love the fact that CrashPlan provides multiple avenues for direct help for technical problems. Those include two options for live contact in chat and telephone support. While live help isn’t available 24×7, the hours are reasonable: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. CDT, Monday through Friday.
For evening and weekend support, you’re not totally on your own since CrashPlan monitors its email queue around the clock. CrashPlan triages tickets to determine severity, meaning your critical issues should prompt reasonably fast responses. Even on non-critical issues, our test emails to CrashPlan usually resulted in emails back within a few hours.
If you’re more of a DIY type, the company also provides a searchable knowledgebase packed with support articles, in addition to guides for both users and account admins.
Carbonite Safe Pro
Carbonite offers telephone support during weekdays, from 8:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST. However, there’s no live chat option for those who prefer written communication.
Alternatively, you can get in touch with Carbonite via email 24×7, providing a means of getting help when the call center is closed. Our test emails resulted in responses usually within a half day and often within a few hours.
Help is also available via a support knowledgebase if you need it. Carbonite maintains a dedicated section for its business backup solution, which includes articles on using its various admin features.
Round Five Thoughts
Both services offer decent technical help options. While we’d like to see 24/7 live support, that’s uncommon among providers unless you go with a service like Acronis Backup, which offers 24/7 premier support for businesses if you’re willing to pay for it (read our Acronis Backup review).
While it won’t make a difference for many business owners, we’re going with CrashPlan for its inclusion of live chat.
Final Verdict
If we’re going by round victories, this battle falls in favor of CrashPlan, three to two. We’d be woefully amiss, however, to suggest that each round victory should carry the same weight. Many of the features we touched on will be more important to some business owners than others, which could potentially sway the victory either way.
However, for the bulk of business owners out there, we believe CrashPlan is a better overall choice than Carbonite. The biggest difference between these two services is cost and device support. There are variances in backup processes, restore processes, security and support, but for the most part, they’re less convincing reasons to choose one or the other.
CrashPlan gives you unlimited backup for your computer for just $10 a month, and that includes local drive backup. A Carbonite Safe Pro subscription, meanwhile, can be used to backup unlimited computers, but you only get 250GB of backup for the base price, which is more than twice the cost of CrashPlan on a per month — and you have to pay for a year up front.
The only case in which we’d really recommend Carbonite over CrashPlan is if you have NAS devices or servers to backup since CrashPlan doesn’t support those machines.
However, if you’re looking for server backup, you probably want a backup service with better data-transfer rates, such as CloudBerry Backup (read our CloudBerry Backup review) paired with a cloud IaaS service like Rackspace or Amazon S3.
Crashplan Proe Support Phone Number
For businesses looking for an affordable computer backup solution, there just aren’t many better solutions out there than CrashPlan for Small Business.
Winner: CrashPlan for Small Business
Crashplan Free
If you remain unconvinced that CrashPlan will be the optimal choice for your business, don’t forget to give our best backup for business article a looksie. We also welcome questions and comments, which you can leave below. Thanks for reading.