Backblaze and CrashPlan are two backup solutions that are related to each other in several aspects. Both of them are simple and user friendly. Both support continuous backup but only be PC per permit.
There are some differences between these two. The most significant difference is CrashPlan Is especially for small businesses. If you are confused and want to find out what suits you best, please go through the below comparison.
This eight-round comparison of Crashplan and Backblaze is structured to choose which one is better for you. These attempts focus on reviews of cloud backup. The scoring method is going to award one point each round, which means the winner has to get a total of 5 points to get the victory.
We tried to compare Backblaze and other backups that include Carbonite (In 2017, it acquired the cloud company named Mozy) and iDrive. In case you are interested, you can check out Backblaze vs Carbonite by us and IDrive vs Backblaze comparison.
You may not like either of these services, and you want some alternatives; you can check out our list consisting of our comparison of online storage and the most helpful cloud backup. If it sounds the same, you can refer to our detailed review on online backup vs cloud storage.
- Features
Both of the services are available for industry users, and subscription plans are also there. Backblaze is a comparatively more straightforward solution specially designed for individual use. On the other hand, Crashplan focuses entirely on business. This means Crashplan has better features as compared to Backblaze. However, the latter is still doing well.
Both of them are licensed to provide cloud storage that is unlimited with a covering of one device. Back blaze supports regular computers only. At the same time, Crashplan offers desktops or servers. These two do not provide backups for mobile devices or NAS. So it’s not that these two have significant differences.
Any removable hard drive can be backed up with the help of online backup solutions. This is as good as other solutions like Degoo ( you can read the Degoo review by us), but they don’t recall removable hard drives.
You might not like to rely on offsite backup services. In that case, Crashplan has assistance for backups that are hybrid. That means you can stock your files on local devices and in cloud simultaneously.
If you are interested in creating a total clone of a hard drive with disk imaging, these two services will not benefit you. If cloning and disk imaging is your preference, check out IDrive or other aids like that.
Another significant discrepancy between these backup solutions is “versioning”. Crashplan allows you to customise in detail. It offers unlimited storage for the retention of files that are deleted and old versions. In contrast, Backblaze has a limitation of 30 days of retention.
If you have to perform restore procedures that are large and take a lot of bandwidth and time, Backblaze can be your solution. It is offering service like courier recovery for solving the problem, as mentioned earlier.
If you have to download massive sized zipped files, that might be troublesome so that you can have external physical drives (USB Device) containing your files. This is where Backblaze is somewhat better than Crashplan because Crashplan does not offer this service.
Backblaze Is the utilisation of multithreading is another benefit. CrashPlan, however, does not include this option, which theoretically can make Backblaze somewhat faster at downloading and uploading data from the web server.
CrashPlan, on the other hand, is much better in terms of user and community management. This isn’t shocking, considering that the program is solely for small company use (and became the topper of our collection of essential online backup service for business), as opposed to Backblaze’s a dual approach.
Although Backblaze offers some simple user and community monitoring, CrashPlan moves further by allowing for more comprehensive control and bulk user imports.
In the case of contingency scheduling, these services are pretty similar. Each supports incremental, continuous, scheduled and incremental backups. Both involve throttling and block-level copying of files that save bandwidth by only downloading the changed portions of files in the place of the entire file.
Backblaze has several other capabilities, including the feature to sync backup settings through several devices. The app “find my phone” is yet another standout feature, designed to track down the smartphone if it is stolen or lost.
Despite these additional features, we must award this to CrashPlan for medium and small enterprises, owing to user management, hybrid backup, superior versioning.
- Pricing
Manyf backup providers have complex pricing structures with several plans and levels, each with its own set of features. CrashPlan and Backblaze for small-sized businesses, fortunately, make pricing a breeze.
Both the services offer one plan that covers only one device and provides unlimited storage to that device. In Backblaze service, the subscription costs $6 monthly, $60 yearly, $110 for a couple of years. CrashPlan is a bit expensive and provides a subscription every month with a $10 monthly fee per server or computer.
It considerably prepares Backblaze to be the cheaper option — especially if you want an entire year or two years plan— because CrashPlan will not provide any annual plans.
In addition to the subscription rate, Backblaze charges an extra fee for a courier retrieval service. This service would charge customers $99 for recovery of fewer than 128GB loaded over to a USB drive and $189 to recover more than 4TB delivered as an optical drive. CrashPlan does not contain a courier service, as previously mentioned.
With all that in mind, Backblaze comes out on top in the pricing section. It is one of the cheapest cloud storage solutions due to its low cost on monthly plans and limitless storage. The score now stands at 1-1. Check out our pricing guide for Backblaze for more information on the service’s subscription model.
- Speed
Backup services must be as simple as possible because you are willing to ensure that your information is safe as soon as possible, after a change or building new data. This is especially true for the original backup, which can contain a large quantity of data and take more time to upload the data. Fortunately, both Backblaze and Crashplan excel at this.
We downloaded and uploaded a 3.51GB file containing various files, including pictures, text, and videos, to test each service’s speed. The broadband connection used had a data speed of 15 Mbps, and 120 Mbps was the download speed, so the backup must be completed within 30 minutes to complete, and the recovery should take about 5 minutes.
Two things are there to be kept in mind, though. These tests seldom get a similar speed limit to theoretical ones, and the analysis was carried from Norway, which is very far away from the United States’ data centres. As a result, a more reasonable estimated time for the upload will be 10 or 15 minutes, and it would take 45 minutes roughly for uploading.
As it is seen from the results, both the services are adequate in case of speed. In comparison,s Backblaze was slightly slow while uploading, not catastrophically, though. As mentioned at the very beginning, this service can save your precious time and bandwidth while downloading with the help of shipping a drive that contains your data.
Despite this, CrashPlan is significantly faster in each category (that is surprising given that it does not allow multithreading). As a result, in this round, it is the clear winner and also takes back the lead, with the current score of 2-1, which is in its favour.
- Simplicity of Use
The number of features and simplicity of use are often negatively proportional. While these two backup solutions are simple to use, Backblaze’s developers specifically put simplicity of use first; all about the programme is built with that in mind.
As a result, the whole Backblaze client can be found in only two tables. The main menu displays the backup status, and a simple configuration panel allows you to tweak items like backup schedules, file exclusions and throttling.
CrashPlan, on either side, is a little more challenging to use. That doesn’t mean it’s an impossible utiliser, but it does take a little more time to figure out where it is. Also, to find out how to use the backup services most effectively. Rather than a single configuration menu. Here are separate settings for every backup collection and global user preferences.
This is perfect for versatility, which Backblaze sorely lacks, but it also brings to the software’s difficulty.
In addition to the desktop app, all services include one web dashboard. This is reasonably easy for Backblaze. Its primary purpose is to make restore operations easier and to allow you to update your account configurations. But it doesn’t do anything else.
Meanwhile, the web dashboard that Crashplan have is incredibly detailed and also a bit complex, containing similar features as the PC.
While neither service allows for cell phone backups, they both have mobile applications for Android and ios that will enable you to access your files from anywhere. These apps are pretty basic, consisting of collecting the devices and the data they store that you can import and control from the applications.
With all of this, Backblaze easily wins this round, which isn’t shocking given how basic the programme is. With four games remaining, our score is now even at 2-2.
- Backup
If everything you need is an option to recover all or most of the files on your computer in one go, Backblaze is a good choice. However, if you’d rather be more careful about the information you submit to the offsite backups, Backblaze makes it hard to do the same.
Instead of selecting the files we would like to backup, go backwards and create a file exclusions list for something you don’t want to backup. Consequently, those who prefer to have complete control over the procedure can find Backblaze challenging to use.
CrashPlan, on the other hand, gives you much more leverage over the entire operation. You can build several backup sets of different files and then customise the configuration for each group separately. You can configure them with varying levels of quality, destinations, throttling limits, schedules, for example.
When your backup is running, CrashPlan offers you a lot of detail about it, including the remaining time, the progress bar, what content is now being uploaded; Backblaze is more ambiguous about this; that doesn’t tell you how long it’ll take or show you the progress bar.
As a result of it all, CrashPlan wins this round easily, restoring its lead as the points rise to 3-2 in the direction off before moving on to the next round, which is all about defence.
- Security
These two backup services provide data security, stunning encryption and two-factor authentication. However, here is a very significant drawback in Backblaze protection, whereas it isn’t an issue for CrashPlan.
All these services utilise AES 256-bit encryption for data on the servers as well as SSL/TLS encryption when data are in motion to protect users from attacks known as a man-in-the-middle. Two-factor authentication is easy to set up on any service, and it adds extra protection by preventing cybercriminals from accessing your files quickly by cracking the password.
Both services toughen the servers against each type of possible failures, including explosions, break-ins, natural disasters, and data centre protection.
Backblaze’s security is severely hampered by its decrease in private encryption. So the reality is that you should upload that encryption key to recover the files, despite the reality that it promises to provide private encryption, allowing its implementation to be highly flawed.
However, CrashPlan clients can rest assured that none can decrypt the files without permission, not even CrashPlan itself.
However, Backblaze can decrypt user data, bringing the service to be forced to solve and hand over your files by an outside party.
This means CrashPlan quickly wins this round, thanks to Backblaze’s shoddy application of personal encryption. When we enter our analysis’s final contests, the score is 4-2, implying that Backblaze’s best outcome is a deadlock.
- Privacy
Some of the exact requirements apply to privacy as they do to protection. As a result, it’s unsurprising that the lack of personal data encryption of Backblaze, which we discussed previously, affects it once more when it comes to privacy.
Backblaze claims to provide private encryption. However, the application is rife with flaws, making it impossible to call it a service with zero knowledge. It would not be an issue if the service’s servers were located in a country that values privacy (for example, that is the issue for Jottacloud)
Backblaze’s servers, on the other hand, are also based in the United States, which has awful online privacy rules, so this isn’t a platform you can use if you’re worried about the government getting access to the data.
PRISM, the Patriot Act, and the Five Eyes network are only a few examples of the US government’s ability to invade digital privacy over the years.
CrashPlan, on the other hand, utilises servers in the United States, but this is less of an issue than this is for services like Backblaze since it comes with totally private encryption. For European users, the latter has a data centre in the Netherlands, and as we discussed in our great selection of the most helpful VPN for the Netherlands, this is not an upgrade.
The privacy policies of each provider are remarkably similar. They also collect different metadata on clients, including email and physical address, your name, billing details, much like other backup providers. They also gather anonymised information like usage statistics, IP Address and hardware signatures, among other things.
As previously stated, this is relatively common, and both online cloud providers say that they will never sell such information to marketers and will disclose only with reliable third-party friends or agencies if required by regulation.
Both services are GDPR compliant, and only CrashPlan offers HIPAA compliance if personal encryption for the backup. Is enabled.
It narrows back to personal encryption once again, making this another convenient win for CrashPlan. As we move on to the finale session, the result is 5-2, indicating that CrashPlan has won the overall victory.
- Support
Though CrashPlan already won the battle, we should look into the customer service of both services. Both of the competitors are very good and excellent in case of customer service, providing support by chat and email, also in extensive knowledge bases.
We tried to test how responsive the customer by sending an inquiry through email. Surprisingly we got satisfactory responses for both. CrashPlan was a bit fast, and they responded within two hours which was beyond our expectation. Beyond what we anticipated, Backblaze responded within a day.
The support via chat opens neatly at the same time CrashPlan begins at 8 a.m., and it is available till 5 p.m. PST. In contrast, Backblaze starts at 9 a.m. and is available till midnight and again from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. PST.
Not only the chat and email service, but Crashplan is also available on calls. It is available during the identical period. Which is available the same way the chat is open.
As Crashplan responds very fast by email and call service, it is the winner in this round. The score is now 6-2. It seems like it won on a slam dunk with the customer service because its other winnings were narrow. So we can’t tell that these two differ much, especially if we look into the final points.
- The Verdict
Let’s conclude the comparison between Backblaze and Crashplan. Though these two services are good enough for backups of external drives and devices —- especially if unlimited storage for backup is your demand — but we also think that CrashPlan is a clear winner for Small Business. This is because of the private encryption, feature-rich nature and speed.
If you want a backup service with unlimited cloud storage, but either of these two is your preference, you might check out the Backup review of Carbonite by us. That is another backup service that is also unlimited.
Who is the Winner? : CrashPlan
Did you like this Backblaze vs Crashplan comparison? And do you feel that CrashPlan is the clear winner as it is more secure, has more privacy and better speed? Do you have another point of view? Do you think that we missed some information about Backblaze? Do you still think Backblaze is a better option and offers better service? Please comment below to let us understand. Thank you very much for reading this.
Leave a Reply