E.g. I use Arq with my Office 365 subscription that costs me Euro 1.38 per month (four year academic discount) for 1TB.
I've also found it occasionally forgets my encryption key for unknown reasons and just silently stops backing up. I get an email about it after a few days, but it's a bit of a rubbish solution.
I also like the BackBlaze team - they share lots with the community and they're open about how they work. CrashPlan feels like more of an enterprisey black hole by comparison. Their blog (https://blog.code42.com/) is one of those weird things that feels more like it's being automatically generated by a Markov chain than written by a human.
On the other hand, CrashPlan does work. That's more than I can say about a lot of the solutions that I tried a few years back (looking at you, Mozy).
CrashPlan requires a device to connect to it's backup at least once within a 6 month period. This is to ensure the integrity of the data we're storing. Part of CrashPlan’s ability to maintain the backup health and integrity relies upon regular connection from the device. CrashPlan is able to routinely perform maintenance on the backup by comparing checksums between both device and CrashPlan Central. If you are unable to connect the device to the backup within a 6 month period, you can also perform a restore from the backup as this qualifies as recent backup activity.
Also, what happens to files that were deleted from the local file system. I was under the impression that they would remain indefinitely available to restore.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
[0]: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html
[1]: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
Last time I lost a laptop, was when somebody stole my laptop bag out of my truck (I forgot to lock it one night while I Was in Barnes & Noble having a coffee). That was a double-whammy, because the USB drive with my backups was in the same bag. :-(
The only saving grace then was that most of my really important data is actually in "the cloud" somewhere (eg, code at GitHub) and that I had an older backup of most of my files on another computer that I bought and used temporarily after I spilled coffee on my old laptop (it started working again after it had a few days to dry out, so I switched back to it).
Anyway, after reading this, I think I'm going to go get another 1TB USB drive, and start keeping a set of backups that I leave at home, instead of carrying around in my laptop bag. That or start pushing stuff to S3 or something. Code is already in GitHub, but there's a lot of other stuff I'd hate to lose.