Hello everyone! We’ve been using Crashplan as a backup solution for some time now, and it was all we ever needed. Crashplan is now discontinuing its service. Carbonite had been offered as a substitute but that seems very pricey as well. We are not a very large church, we would need to backup about 30-35 computers, mostly Mac’s and 2 file servers. With OneDrive syncing, we don’t have to rely on a backup service very often, but we do have to resort of it a few times per year. Crashplan was free for us, cost is very much an issue. What would you advise as a low cost full backup solution that basically provides similar service as Crashplan? Currently, we are backing up about 850 gigs. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks guys!
Since you’re set up with OneDrive already, I’d reiterate to users to put their documents in OneDrive and then pay the $20/m to cover the 2 file servers with Crashplan Pro. I think for the hands-off service CPP provides, that’s about as cheap as you can get it.
If photo/video libraries are a concern on workstations, you might choose to back up a select few in Crashplan as well, or even Time Machine to external HD.
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My guess is that a lot of churches use Google G Suite for Non-Profits since it is free.
It includes 30G of storage per user so one option is to use Google Backup and Sync. I don’t currently do this, but would be interested in knowing how it works.
I use duplicacy and backup to a local NAS and a server at a remote location. But it could be simpler for non-technical users.
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For the servers you could use Cloudberry, and push the update to a OneDrive account just for backups. Besides data, Cloudberry can do full bare metal server backup. Cloudberry is a one time purchase of software. The Office 365 Business Essentials our church uses has a full 1TB of space per user.
- Greg
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We use iDrive and BO about 1TB, best thing I can say is it works in the background, sends daily confirming emails and rarely needs attention. Very satisfied.
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Just to be clear, CrashPlan is eliminating their “Home” service, not their “Small Business” service. At $10/month, it’s still a pretty good deal, and converting from the “Home” service to “Small Business” service seems to be rather straightforward:
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I have found crash plan to throttle large uploads, so I use Cloud Berry to backup to Backblaze B2 storage.
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Okay, Onedrive or Google File Stream is not by itself a good backup strategy as an attacker can encrypt files and delete all previous versions if they have sufficient access rights. That moment the accountant falls for a phishing email and gives up API access to her O365 account you’re going to really wish you had a separate backup strategy! 
Anyhow, storage out on the cloud is probably cheapest on Backblaze B2 and it performs okay as long as you don’t need to do immediate disaster recovery. Veeam Free is good for backing things up inside the network and is probably the most reliable I’ve worked with but you need to build out some infrastructure to do an offsite backup. Duplicati is a very good FOSS backup client to backup directly to the cloud that if used in conjunction with B2 will be very cost effective.
If you just want to get something pretty much like Crashplan, Backblaze for business is $50/year which is pretty low, but you’ll beat costs and performance with Cloudberry or Duplicati to B2.
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Thank you, everyone for the valuable advice, and for taking the time to help us out.
Don, we have a similar environment. Just a little larger scale. For a low cost solution a couple of 2 TByte drives and an image backup program will do the job.
One drive you can use to perform Time Machine backups of all your Macs and the PC backups and images too. PCs have their own backup solutions built in that you can direct to nested folders on the same drive. We keep one image of the standard Mac setup on the backup drive and then, exclude apps from the TM backup. That will conserve a lot of space.
Then use the second drive to make a copy of the backup drive and store it offsite. You could use a cloud based service, but this is a cheaper way to go.
Because of our larger scale, we use Lacie 2Big drives, but for your size a couple of 2 TByte drives will do. We use Intego Backup Manager Pro for the image backups, but there are lots of serviceable backup programs out there to do this. When you look at 2 TByte drives you’ll find many of them come with a backup program. This is probably a good low cost route for you to take.
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We use G Suite for Non-Profits as well. This works great for the vast majority of our staff, as it works really well for smaller documents and files, and it’s my understanding that any documents created in Drive (ex: Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.) don’t count toward your storage size.
However, our media staff need a more robust storage system, so we use Synology disk backup and Backblaze for them.
It really depends on your needs and the type of files you’re needing to backup!
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Why no recommendations for Azure backup? Our $5K credit (free for NPOs) more than covers our small church’s needs with a VM (web and email lists server) and site backup.
We like it a lot.
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