Anurag Yagnik

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Crashplan - a great restore experience

I am in the middle of recovering over a Terabyte of data backed-up to Crashplan and am very happy with the experience so far. 

I am a backup fanatic and proud of it. I recently had some issues the Drobo device that I use as my primary storage and as often happens - the Time Machine backup on the other Drobo device got corrupted as well. I had other backups for most things but my older Aperture libraries, though important, aren't used every day and the only backup of those I had was in the two online backup services I had - Backblaze and Crashplan. Both great services that I've restored files from in the past but never files this large. We are talking about 7 Aperture Libraries collectively over 1 TB of data. (I switched from Aperture to Lightroom in 2013 and couldn't be happier but that's a different story)

I was weighing my options and checked the restore feature of Backblaze. Seemed like if I was downloading more than 128GB - I'd need to get USB Hard Drive. However, I really wanted to just download. I was in no rush as I don't use these files daily.

Crashplan on the other hand - simply allowed me to restore whatever I wanted directly online. That seemed like a better option so I tentatively gave it a try. I've already restored about 400GB of data over the last couple days and the experience has been pretty great so far. 

I highly recommend Crashplan. If you aren't taking online backups yet, please start immediately. You have no idea how bad you will feel if you lose your precious data and specially photos.