Adrian Guy Crook

Over about 14 years, I’ve amassed a collection of dozens of CDs and DVDs as well as a 160GB external HD - all for the purposes of backing up my files.

There are old PST files in there, previous versions of my personal website, files from my EA Canada days (design docs, etc) and virtually everything I’ve done professionally for almost my entire career. I’m amazed the CDs held up as well as they have as some of them go back to 1997, at least.

So now we’re in the middle of a giant Life Streamlining project… we’ve sold our house and virtually all our possessions, and swapped our analog assets (DVDs, Blurays, books) for digital ones (I paid a local guy $100 to convert 76 DVDs to ISO & MP4 format!).

In that spirit of streamlining, I decided to amalgamate all my various backups into one online location (and likely a physical USB HDD as well). When I started poking around for how best to do this, it wasn’t super simple. There are two big swaths to the cloud storage industry:

1. Virtual Drives - Allows you to copy any files to a volume that exists on Amazon S3, for instance, and pay for that privilege (about 15c/GB, per month). In my case, this would have added up fast as I probably have 200GB or so (i.e. $30/month!).
2. Backup Services - Allows for routine backup of files on your local disk. Several of these services bill themselves as “Unlimited” - meaning there is no cap to the amount you can store.

#1 was cost-prohibitive for my data size, so I scanned the offerings in #2. Unfortunately, several of the leading recommendations in the #2 category only allow backups from your local disk. Furthermore, if you delete a file, they delete it as well!

This leads to scenarios where you either a) are not allowed to backup an external HD at all (Carbonite has this restriction) or you can back it up, but if you leave it unplugged for more than 30 days, they delete that backup (Backblaze).

Both are major showstoppers. I didn’t want a mirror of my local HD that I could restore back onto my local. I wanted a giant online archive of all the files I have.

This is when I stumbled upon CrashPlan. Initially, it seemed to suffer the same issues the others did. It used a backup client, so I feared I’d be fenced off from backing up my external HD and discs yet again. However, Crashplan has one option the others did not: the ability to seed your initial upload to Crashplan servers via loading up a 1TB USB HDD that they send you with a pre-paid return envelope.

This also saves a HUGE amount of time versus the other services, where I was almost certainly going to have to upgrade my home internet plan simply to be able to upload 200GB of data in anything less than 6 months.

Crashplan only sends these HDDs out to US customers, so I signed up with a PO box company in Point Roberts to receive it. A short road trip is better than babysitting weeks of an upload, thank you very much.