Comment by pacemkr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pacemkr | Hacker News Reader

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I'd like to second and stress that CrashPlan supports client side encryption using a private key. This means that _nobody_ can ever get to your files without the key (not even you), no matter how much access is granted to the CrashPlan servers. From what I remember from my research, they were one of the few online backup providers that offers this option.

I also love the fact that you get email alerts about the backup status for every destination (in one email) local or to remote.

I've been extremely happy with the service. It keeps multiple versions of files and backs them up continuously if you have CrashPlan+. This has already saved my bacon more than once.

The icing on the cake is that you can designate some storage as a backup well of sorts and have your family (or other computers) back up to this destination. This is very easy to setup and has worked flawlessly for me, no networking or "what is my ip" voodoo.

I like this, but... how is it free?

I didn't say it was free... Neither did the OP ask for a free solution. So...

Ah, I understand: my grammar was unclear. I just saw the first page, where it said "free," and I was confused about what the economics of the plan were. I don't care if it is free, and in fact that free factor was a concern, since I was wondering how it stayed in business. Clicking through and seeing the pricing, I understand now. The question was more "how does it stay in business," not, "in what way is it free." : )

I didn't realize that you were the original poster, sorry.

I admit their product offering is a bit confusing. It does make sense though:

You can install CrashPlan (the regular, free version) on any number of computers and set them up to back to each other/external drives/ftp/etc. This works wonders for family computers, for example. At this point its all free.

If thats not enough for you you can buy the "Plus" version of the software that offers continuous backup, stronger encryption, etc. This is where it stops being free; you're down something like $60 for the software.

Regardless of which version of the software you use, however, you can pay for CrashPlan Central, which is effectively another backup destination that happens to be on their servers, this is the "online" portion of their offering. The cost is more or less on part with the Mozys out there.

So technically if you are OK with backing up just between your existing machines and you don't need up to the minute backups, their free offering will work just fine for you and it works well.

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