After thinking I’d found the golden solution for backups for all my workstations using CrashPlan’s free “computer-to-computer” backups, they announced that they were discontinuing their home version. This meant that I needed to either upgrade to their “new” small business plan ($10 per computer/month) which, as an aside, didn’t include the computer-to-computer backup option (the reason I selected them in the first place) or do as they suggested and migrate to the uber-expensive Carbonite for $50 per computer/year.
I’m not sure about you but I’m not prepared to spend $300/year to backup my systems to the cloud for the 1 time I need to restore files. Thus, I set out to find another solution to my backup problem. My solution needed a few things:
- Cost effective for 5+ machines
- Ability to backup locally as well as to a “cloud”
- Ability to backup from anywhere
Three days into my search I was becoming discouraged. I’d looked at iDrive, Backblaze, Acronis, and even went so far as to take another look at Time Machine (yuck). However, none of these met my simple requirements for backups… until I happened to stumble upon ArqBackup. This piece of software costs only $50 for all my computers, allows me to use SFTP to backup to a local server, as well as select just about any cloud vendor of my choice to store my offline backups! Finally!
The installation was simple and I enjoyed the simple yet powerful interface right out of the box. I’ve already completed a first initial backup via SFTP and thus far I’ve been extremely impressed. I’m still doing some testing but thus far I can say with quite a bit of certainty that ArqBackup will be the new backup solution for me!
Take that CrashPlan.