- With supposedly reputable
websites like TechRadar calling the likes of Microsoft
365 a backup solution even though Microsoft specifically states in their T's and C's that
they don't back up your data. It's no wonder that people are getting their knickers in a twist when it comes to backing up their data. So if you're new around here hi, I'm Pete. And today we're answering the question of what is the best cloud
backup service in 2021. If you haven't seen already I've made a video around the
best cloud storage for 2021. And one of the most common
comments on that was, well if they're not backing
up your data then how do I? First up make sure you
subscribed because well YouTube. Second smash that like button. First time I said,
smash still feels weird. Then third, watch this video. So here it is the best
cloud backup service in 2021 a review. And because there are quite a
few backup providers out there today we're gonna be
looking at a small selection of what's out there. Probably the most reputable
or well-known names, well-known names. Or this video will be
like just far too long. Now, unfortunately the one backup provider who I kept seeing top all of the charts on like
all the other comparisons. SOS Online Backup. They're no longer taking on new customers unless you have more than five users or more than 5TB of backup data. So we'll just exclude them straight away. But with that said, today,
we're gonna be looking at Backblaze, IDrive,
Carbonite, and CrashPlan. And for each of these
we're gonna be looking at the key headlines of
price, device supports, the backups themselves, restoration experience,
security, support experience and user experience. Now, as with all of my reviews, I'm actually signing up for these myself and paying what they cost. So I can actually test them
like nobody's sponsoring this. And after I finish up this video I'm then gonna search
around and see if I can find any discounts for anybody
interested in signing up. If you want to use the links
in the description below you can get those discounts too. For my tests I haven't just
installed this on a test machine or just looked over
like the specs online to regurgitate the stuff. I've literally installed this
on my main machine that I use. And I've used these
products for a few weeks which is kind of stupid in a way, because, well I think I'm gonna have to
wipe my computers fairly soon cause I'm just installing so much junk on them at the moment. But at least you can't
say it's not a real test. Now, do you make sure to
stick around until the end because after we've looked at the options I'm gonna briefly touch on why you shouldn't be using Microsoft 365, or Gmail, or Dropbox, or any of those other
cloud storage platforms as your backup. And whilst you are watching, make sure to let us know what backup software
you are using right now. If you are using one. and how well it's working
for you down in the comments. It's always great to hear experience from other people just in case there are other options out there, help others make a
decision for themselves. Kicking off or rather firing up. Let's talk about Backblaze. Pricing is really simple here. $6 per month per computer, or $60 per year for unlimited data. That's pretty much as simple as it gets. On device support it
does support Mac and PC, no mobile clients here. And if you want to back up a NAS drive then you'll need to sign up for their B2 cloud storage instead. You can however backup
external hard drives. Over to the backups themselves and for versioning and retention it does 30 days by default, or you can pay an additional $2 per month to extend that up to one year. And they also do offer an unlimited option for like an additional fee. Really great if you need
to hold onto your data for a very long time, absolutely
no complaints there at all again, simple as you like. It also defaults to continuous
backup, which is great. It doesn't offer deduplication but of course it is unlimited data so that's kind of not really an issue. For restoration you can get
Backblaze to ship you a drive with your data on it
worldwide, which you do pay for but they also will then refund the cost if you then return the drive
to them within 30 stays. Which is of course great
for those in the U.S. but not quite sure how well that stacks up after you factor in return shipping costs from like outside the U.S.
but at least it's an option. For other more regular file
restorations it's okay. You can restore directly the app and you have to go through the web portal. And anything more than a
single file restoration needs like zipping up which means you kind of
sat there waiting for your restore is being prepared. Nut when you do download it,
it is really really quick. So I don't really have any issues per se. It's just not as nicely integrated as some of the rest of the other apps. Security wise Backblaze
uses 256 bit encryption and they let you set up your
own private encryption key. Which is a really nice thing to see so that you can encrypt your data to make sure that even Backblaze
themselves can't access it. Over in support. They have live chat, though
it wasn't actually available whilst I was trying to
use it in the afternoon and evening here in the UK. But I did submit a ticket to them and they did come back to
me within a couple of hours with a really good response. The user experience. Backblaze is kind of an interesting one particularly on the Mac since it integrates with
the system preferences panel rather than having a
separate app that you run. But this does mean that
it looks sleek and simple. I mean, I like it. And pay very close attention to this. It actually uploaded at full speed my full 110 megabytes per second upload. I actually even saw 130
megabytes per second at one point which is kind of interesting because I only pay for
110 megabytes per second. But hey, now to get it to
do this I did have to go into the settings and set
it to unlimited bandwidth and set these simultaneous
file upload to its maximum. Even though it warns me that only really fast computers should
play with this setting and that they also recommend setting it to no more than six threads. Well, screw that. And if you wanna talk
about performance once more my M1 Mac Mini, even when this
programme is set to 30 threads, my CPU is only hitting 10% at its peak. Absolutely killing it. You should, of course
go and watch my videos which I'll link up here and down below on the M1 Mac Mini review. Only and I really mean the only only niggle
that I have with this, is that you can't see
what it's backing up. It's meant to be intelligent
enough to know what to back up which it does say is because it gives
you that peace of mind. But I'd also kind of liked
to have the piece of it mind, by seeing which folders and files it thinks you should be backing up. But hey, you can check this by going to restore something anyway. So not a huge issue. Anyway, calming down. Next up we have IDrive. Pricing wise we are at five gig for free, $52.12 for 5TB and 10TB for $74 62. And those prices are one year, one user, unlimited computers. Which is really nice to have because some of the others only
include a single machine for that monthly or yearly cost. When it comes to device support IDrive supports Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. Though I didn't actually
test the mobile client as just honestly I have no use for it. But IDrive does also support
external drives and NAS drives. So if like me, you have a tonne of files sat on a separate NAS device
for those muggles amongst us. - It's the muggles. - Muggles. - It's basically just like a box with a tonne of hard discs in it. You can back that up with IDrive too. And it will even work on
their entry-level pay for plan which is really really great. Looking at the actual backups themselves. It starts off with pretty good news. First off IDrive can ship
a physical drive to you to do like a local backup. If perhaps your internet
connections too poor they will physically
post you a hard drive. Which you can then
connect to your machine, back up your data to and then post it back to
them to store and upload. All of this whilst your
data is securely encrypted and the service is worldwide. Though you might have to pay shipping fees and custom fees depending
on where you are. But they're not extortionate prices. IDrive does have continuous protection, though you do have to remember
to enable this manually within the settings, after
you instal the client. And only works for files
up to 500 meg in size. Files bigger than that will be picked up in their daily backup
job that you configured to run overnight. And once your files are backed up, then they'll retain up to 30
versions of all files backed up on your account. It's really good. The only here really is that IDrive doesn't offer deduplication so that you're not actually backing up multiple copies of the same file. Which would be kind of nice to have since you're paying based on
how much data you're storing, that is the backup what about restoring. And good news again start with, IDrive can ship your drive
again worldwide with your data. So if you need one, if
your computer blows up if you've got terabytes of data but maybe a slow internet connection, there is a great option for you. Though of course, you
then have the delays of shipping it and then you
copying data from the drive but it's still a really nice to have. And if you're a U.S. customer they actually have an
overnight shipping option which will get your
data, next day delivery. Which is really really good. Otherwise, if you want
to just restore a file within IDrive client itself. Then it is just a case of
browsing file structure, checking the box, choosing
the restore location and then clicking restore now. UI great. The speed of which it
downloaded, not so great. The maximum it hit was 30 megs per second and I have a one gig connection. So I should be able to hit over like a thousand megabits per seconds. This seems to be a recurring issue with these cloud backup services. But what I will say is that using IDrive I did see some of the
better speeds of the others with the exception of Backblaze. Over in security land. I quite like that IDrive lets you set your own encryption key. It does tell you to say
that if you do set one then you can't share files
because well it's encrypted with your own encryption key. And you should be using a backup service to backup your files, not as a file sharing service. That is what the likes of
Dropbox and Google Drive and 365 are for. And all files are encrypted with a standard 256 bit encryption. For support, they do have online chat, which in my experience gave
me a near instant response. And I also submitted a
ticket via their website at 11:29 AM on Wednesday the 3rd of March and got a response two hours later. So again, really good going right there in the support department. Finally for user experience. Well, bit of a mixed bag to be honest I haven't been blown away by the software. In fact, it still reports
that my quota is zero bytes, when I should have up to
five terabytes of quota within the clients. So it's kind of still
prompting me up to upgrade even though I'm a paying customer. Although that did then update itself a few days later strangely. Setting my initial backup
job was really really easy. But when the job started, it kind of like just
locks up the client for me for a really long time. I guess it was like trying
to process all the files that it needs to back up. And I did have a couple of
different experiences here in terms of the upload speeds. On PC I could hit around 20
to 30 megabits per second which is great for most
people to be honest. But that said again, I do
have a 120 Meg upload speed, I'm not quite sure why IDrive wouldn't use the full
bandwidth that was available. But over on the Mac side,
it was much much slower. I had 198 gig and total to uploads and it completed it in over 20 hours. So completed it, good 20 hours, not so good. And if you look at the
upload stats from my Mac which again is hardwired
into a one gig down and 110 meg up connection. But the upload speeds barely ever reached over 10 mega per seconds, even Plex which the kids were watching
a movie on next door was uploading faster than IDrive could upload to the internet. And my M1 Mac CPU and memory were like barely doing anything. So it seems to be a limitation
of the IDrive client itself or maybe it's just not M1 compatible yet. When I asked their support about this they did ask me to do
a speed test to Oregon. So I'm guessing their
data is at least initially being backed up to Oregon before hopefully being
replicated everywhere else. Overall thoughts, great
pricing, great features. The client app is pretty good and the upload speeds for most
people, won't be an issue. But, if you do upload faster than, 20 or 30 megabits per seconds then it may be worth checking
out one of the other options. Next we're taking a look at
the one that's been around for a very long time Carbonite. Getting straight into pricing the basic computer backup is $24 per month when billed annually. But if you check the home
computers box on their website, it then offers you an
option for $6 per month when billed annually, with just a couple of less features which for a home use are
probably not a big issue. And all of these plans seems to come with unlimited storage, but for a single machine. If you want more machines then you just sign up
for more subscriptions. And actually I had some issues here because their website has a number of versions of that pricing and comparison pages. Which all show completely different things which is confusing. Click on compare backup plans. And it only shows you the $24 plan until you then click on
that home computers button. Click on home backup
at the top of the page and then buy now, and you come to a completely different one which seems to be based
on numbers of computers but does show the $6 plan. But if you go back to
the same home backup page and then click get started, it then takes you to a screen which now shows you a starting price of $6 with then optional extras to add things like external hard
drive backup, antivirus the courier recovery service. And interestingly automatic video backup, more on that in a moment. Over in device support land. Again, we've got Windows
and Mac support though. No support yet for the new M1 Macs and there's no mobile client either. You can back up a single
external hard drive if you upgrade to the higher tiers. And there is no NAS support other than backing up a Mac drive which only works on windows. For actual backups themselves Carbonite has a 30 day
retention, which is good. It's not quite as good as having
say a 30 version of history like IDrive does just in case you delete something then don't notice something for a while. And when I talked about
pricing a moment ago I mentioned an interesting find on their get started
variant in other signup page which had an optional extra
called automatic video backup. And if you scroll down it
proceeds to tell you that any video file over four gig must be manually added to their backup. I mean, that's me out from being able to use
this product completely. And since a four gig video
file from say an iPhone is around 10 minutes worth of 4K footage. it's not good. But then I found another
article on the website talking about file size limits. And it seems that Carbonite
won't automatically upload any file above four gig unless you upgrade to the higher tiers. I mean that's just the nail in the coffin. I don't wanna be double-checking that all my files are under four gig, even without video files four gigs still isn't
much in today's world, and take away that peace of mind that everything is backed
up would be soul destroying. If you ever missed anything
and wanted to get it back. On that basis, I'm gonna completely skirt over the next few items. As I just can't recommend Carbonite with their four gig limit
and confusing website. And well, when it comes to restorations guess what you need to
upgrade to their higher tier to get a courier service. Security is all managed by Carbonite which I don't find as secure as being able to set your own keys. And on the lower plans,
it's also 128 bit encryption and not the 256 bit offered by others. So half a secure. Support for me was another
confusing experience. I actually did call their pre-sales number listed on the website, as I was still trying to
figure out the pricing plans and the person who answered
it didn't have a clue or didn't know anything about their consumer backup products. And even mentioned that
he wondered if the phone had be forwarding to them
for some strange reason. You do get a phone number and
you can submit an email ticket no live chat that I can see. Though the person I did
speak to on the phone said, I should be able
to follow the website and get to online chat. Well, just pretty awful to be honest but I did send the ticket
through to support. And four days later now I still haven't received a response. So a big big no in that department. Carbonite fell over for me again in the user experience department. When I downloaded the client I had issues getting it to run. And to be honest the installer
just looks badly designed and reminds me of like one
of those windows XP apps being forced to run on windows
10, if you get what I mean. Also the UI was like really basic. It's all I can say really. There's no options, there's
nothing really to configure. It just backs up and you could
select folders to back up. That's kind of it upload
speeds were just abysmal. So as said earlier, I really
just can't recommend Carbonite. Don't buy it. Don't use it. Please go with one of the other
options and full disclosure. I didn't even bother testing it on windows because all the issues I
kept finding with it just made me not want to use it. I've only actually left this segment in to hopefully show you
what big differences are between them and any other providers. So in summary, one hot mess. Onto CrashPlan with CrashPlan one is
actually for small businesses but I did want to give us a try. I've heard such good things. And I did kind of not really see the issue when you're signing up
as an individual anyway. Kind of like when you sign
up for Google Workspace and pretend to be a business just to get their unlimited
storage offerings. Pricing is nice and simple with CrashPlan. It is $9.99 per month
per device, plus taxes for unlimited space with
no file size restrictions. And they have a free 30 day trial. Well, this is refreshing. CrashPlan supports Mac,
Windows, and Linux, no iOS or Android support. And it does support external hard drives but no direct support for NAS. Though you can map drives through to a NAS and it will back them
up on both Mac and PC. For the actual backups themselves. Well, let's run through a checklist. Retention, yes. Configurable versioning, yes. Configurable continuous backup, yes. deduplication. Yes. Ding, ding, ding. And it just looks and works so much better than some other competitors
naming no names. It is a shame that with everything else looking
so good about CrashPlan but they don't offer a courier service, minor detail for some. But for others if you
need terabytes of data and you didn't wanna wait
weeks to download it. A disc being posted to you
would be so much faster. So this may be a key point for those with a lot of data who
need to access it quickly. But with that said restoring
files was quick and easy, but worth noting that
even restoring large files I never really got more than a hundred Meg download speeds. Even though again, I'm
on a one gig connection. So if you are downloading a lot of data then that can be kind of limiting. For security 256 bit
encryption as standard. And I do like that you can
set a password or a key which must be entered before
you can then restore anything. Including by CrashPlan themselves. So that gives you
another layer of security that your data is safe. Unlike backup providers who don't let you set your own encryption keys. Support has been great
so far with CrashPlan. They have a live chat that
was quick and had no queue. And the person I did speak to could see exactly what was going on and they were able to help
without messing around. Sometimes when you get
bogged down in those can I please confirm that
your computer is switched on? I have confirmed that your
computer is now switched on. Now I would like to confirm that you have the
installed the application. - Hello IT have you tried
turning this off and on again? - But they also chased
up a number of times after resolving the issue to
make sure things were solved. So they definitely
performed well for support. But then again, that's
kind of what you expect from a business product. Over in the user experience department it was super simple to sign up really easy to instal the app, which just has a tonne of options to set bandwidth limits and alerts
if backup jobs don't run. And just overall it
looked clean and modern. And like it had been updated this century. which is a far cry from some of the others I tested. it backs up all files of all sizes continuously with no restrictions. So at least with this, you could set it up and be safe that everything
is being taken care of. But with big caveats. I couldn't get any more than
maybe five meg upload speeds on the Mac and 10 meg,
maybe 15 at most on Windows. And I kept getting
prompted to sign back in. When I came back to look
at the app after a while, which was kind of annoying. And these were both running
on fairly Vanilla instals with high spec machines
that weren't struggling to upload at faster speeds Like we've seen with other
backup providers here. Overall it does look like a great app with some really great
features, great pricing just let down by the
transfer speeds really. And those speeds may not affect you. It could be my location
or, or something else but also a slight annoyance
that it did keep signing me out. So this is another really good conundrum one worth testing yourself. Aside from the fact it's
more a business product it looks to be a really great product other than those all speeds again. Recommendation and summary time before we talk briefly about the whole Microsoft 365, Google
Workspace backup thing after looking at all of
these options the only one I do really mean the only
one I can fully recommend is Backblaze for me personally on sheer transfer speeds alone it makes the other services
nearly just unusable. If you want to back up and
restore your data quickly providing you have a fast connection. The only real negative I
see to restore anything. You have to go to the website and download the file as a zip file. Whereas the others are you just restored directly via the app. And then to whichever location you wanted it to go to on your computer. If you don't have fast
upload speeds like me and perhaps a more normal cap of maybe like 20 meg per seconds. then IDrive would be my
recommendation as another option. And notice how I haven't
really said anything about price here. In my opinion all of these services with the exception of
that hot mess of Carbonite provide value for money. It is not unreasonable to
pay any of these amounts for peace of mind that
your data is protected. As I mentioned before, I will put a link in the description below to sign up for any of these services. And if I can find any discounts I'll be sure to link those as well. With that said, and after you've
subscribed to this channel because that really
helps the channel to grow and be seen by more people. Why isn't Microsoft 365, or
Google workspace, or Dropbox or any of these cloud backup
storage providers a backup. Well with Microsoft 365 as an example they specifically stay
in their T's and C's that nobody reached when signing up. That they do not back up your data and that you are responsible for ensuring that your data is backed up. They will ensure your data's available but no guarantees that
they can recover your data if it gets deleted or
lost, or ransomwared. And this is the same
with Google as well but not strictly true with
the likes of Dropbox who will actually give you either a 30 day or 180 day history of your files depending what your plan
you're signed up for. The reason why I wouldn't
personally say to use Dropbox to store your files,
and use it as a backup. Is that well in the IT industry there's always been this
backup rule of 3-2-1. always keep at least
three copies of your data stored in two different locations. And one of them being off-site. For me I have my data on my laptop, NAS, and the cloud, three copies of data in two locations, one off-site. So for you to use Dropbox
as both a file storage and a backup solution, it just kind of adds the element of risk. And what if Dropbox ever got targeted or had a big disaster or their
data centres got flooded? Yes. I'm sure that technically speaking they're all set up to
cope with such an event but it isn't uncommon
for big big companies to have massive outages. Who then realise that actually their backup plans weren't quite as good as they thought. I'm pretty sure that you
wouldn't want to find that your data was saying that didn't quite work area. And proof is in the pudding days maybe even hours after shooting this video French cloud operator
OVH suffered a disaster after a fire ripped through a data centre currently taking offline
3.6 million websites. And with the CEO taking to Twitter to ask their customers to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan. Then followed an announcement that some services it
classes as recoverable. Well, they yet to locate any backups. Back to me so always best to have your
data backed up somewhere else just to be safe. If you like this video, then don't forget to check out this one where I talk about the best
cloud storage providers, or how about this one where I reviewed the
best password managers. Subscribe to the channel for more videos, click the join button to become
a member for no other reason than saying thanks for
making these videos. Give the video thumbs up if you didn't. Hit the notification bell to be notified when new videos are posted. Or if you didn't let me know
how I can make you feel better by leaving a comment down below and I'll see you the next one, bye bye.
