Crashplan Backup

This is my first attempt at a blog.  I'm going to start by providing tips for folks to keep themselves safe, whether it be online or otherwise.

My first tip will be to back up your data.  There has been a rash of ransomware going around lately that encrypts all your data.  They ask for a ransom in order to get the password to decrypt it.

I use Crashplan.  It's about $5 a month for one computer to back unlimited data up to the cloud.  Our phones are backed up to Google and all other devices feed into my main computer, so this works for me.  

They have 3 methods of backup:
1) Backup to external hard drive or network share.  This is free.
2) Backup to a friend.  If you have a lot of data, you can backup using step one, then give the external drive to your friend, have them install the software and keep your stuff backed up offsite for free.
3) Backup to the cloud.  This is the only thing you have to pay for, but data is unlimited.  I have 5 TB up there now (it took 4 months to get it up there).

The only downside is if you have over a TB, you'll need to make sure you have a large amount of RAM installed and do a memory tweak.  Since it runs on Java, it can be a memory hog.

Many folks speak very highly of backblaze as well.  It does not offer the option of backing up to a friend.

As for me, since I have so much data and it is very slow to upload, I back everything up to a external hard drive and began backing critical data to the cloud.  Once that completed, I began the 4 month task of letting everything upload to the cloud.

From a security perspective, you don't want anyone snooping in your data, thus Crashplan also allows the option of encrypting your data with a separate personal key.  DO THIS!!!!  Then save the key to a separate cloud service.  If you lose it, you lose your data.  The benefit of this is I no longer really care about the security of the crashplan service.  So long as they use standard algorithms (they do) the only way someone can see my data is to get a hold of my key.