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I considered the same thing. But when you are backing up several terabytes of photos and home movies collected over many years the cost of storing them on Glacier isn't as cheap as using the unlimited service of Crashplan or Backblaze ($10 a month vs $5-6 month). Furthermore, Crashplan and Backblaze don't charge you to retrieve your data unlike Glacier, which is where it gets very expensive.

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Absolutely. After messing around with various combinations of rsync/ssh/unison/s3/glacier/etc for a few years, I bit the bullet and paid for Crashplan. It's cheap - the family plan is ~150 USD/year for up to ten computers, unlimited.

It's a lifesaver. I've installed it on my parents/wifes/siblings computers and the piece of mind it gives me is immense - when I get the inevitable phone calls about the damn computer deleting that important file, I can either tell them how to recover it, or do it myself.

I'd like to use the Crashplan Family option to cover everyone but since it's all shared and there's seemingly no way to silo the data per-computer, that's a total non-starter. Which is a shame because I'd love to give them my cash.

Just get an individual account for that purpose?

Doesn't really solve the problem of backing up multiple machines spread over multiple sites for multiple people though.

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