I’m a huge supporter of having multiple backups, this is why I pay $4.95 USD a month for a mozy home subscription to backup ALL the files I want off to a secure off site location so that if a hard drive fails (and I’ve had 2 or 3 do this including a brand new 1TB hard drive from Hitachi).
So as I was reading this Lifehacker article on the 5 best backup tools, I was very surprised to see a program called Crash Plan as one of the five best since I hadn’t even heard of it before.
Anyhow, since I had mozy’s online backup service.. I decided that I’d compare.. and I’m kind of glad I did honestly, it offers a number of features which I actually hope mozy implements, as if they don’t.. I’ll be leaving.
The #1 feature I like about Crash Plan is it’s ability to have a ‘friend backup’. Meaning I can have 2 computers and have one backup to the other.. this is extremely handy if you want a friend of another computer with a large amount of unused space that you can use as a backup for your pictures (which is what I do).
The other features I like is having multiple spots for backup.. ie: friends, a local folder, and online (and their pricing is about the same as mozy).
What I was wondering about initially was if they had incremental backups, which means that changes are uploaded to the server and you could restore from a certain date.. but I’m starting to question whether or not that’s really important. They could actually offer that and I may not even know it.
Anyhow I wanted to mention it as I think it’s a really good idea for anyone who DOESN’T have a backup solution, to go out and get one.. Crash Plan offers 30 days of free online storage.. I tell you it’s good piece of mind to have them all backed up somewhere online.