Crashplan vs. Carbonite 2015 – You won’t believe this…

I’ve been using Carbonite for my personal / business backup for over three years now. I have about 55 GB of data that I back up. When I installed Carbonite the first time, it took several days to backup this data. I have a fiber Internet connection running at 1 GB so I knew that was not the bottleneck. Fast forward to today and I decided to switch to Crashplan. After running through the installer and setting everything up, I started the backup. I then saw a backup speed of 70 megabytes per second! This is literally several hundred times faster than Carbonite, which backs up and restores at around 0.5 megabytes per second. At this rate it will be an hour or two to backup all my data! That is so much faster than Carbonite.

The installer for Crashplan was very fast and easy. The only part that took me a minute to figure out was that I needed to create a new account rather than trying to login with something. I thought that buying the subscription on the website would have created the account, but it did not, so I had to create my account in the Windows application itself. No big deal.

Both services offer unlimited backup and feature standard levels of encryption and security.

Carbonite is more painful with file management, as it does not backup videos or large files by default. Crashplan backs up all your documents by default, regardless of size or extension.

My wife’s computer also uses Carbonite (but I’ll be switching to Crashplan for sure when that subscription expires) and it has been restoring a 550GB backup for almost a month now.

The pricing on Carbonite as of January 2015 is 59.99 USD per year, and Crashplan is 47.99 (special offer for the new year), otherwise it’s also 59.99 USD, although discounted if you pay for more years up front.

Happy new year, and make sure to have some sort of backup plan for your computers. My computer drive has crashed twice in the last decade, and my wife’s has three times, so a backup plan of some sort is very much worthwhile.

You can start a Crashplan subscription by clicking here.