It was actually a tough choice. I was weighing many options. Do I just go with the well-known leaders (by customer base), such as Mozy or Carbonite? Do I go with a provider that offers me a finite quantity of backup space per subscription, but allows me to backup unlimited computers, such as SpiderOak?

Obviously, the answers to these questions were “No”; so here is why I went with Backblaze:

• Good communication – Backblaze communicated with me via Twitter and answered my pre-sales questions via email. SpiderOak was also very good in its email communication with me. Carbonite, iDrive, Mozy, Safecopy also communicated with me satisfactorily as well.
• Let me into the Mac beta trial — While very late into the party (they publicly released for the Mac a week later), Backblaze gave me an invitation to try their Mac service before it went public.
• Ease of Use / Function Offering Ratio Balance — It was very easy to set up the client on my MacBook Pro and get to backing up. An icon sits in my menu bar and allows me quick access to see what and how much is being backed up. But just because it is easy to use, doesn’t mean they skimped on the functionality. I can throttle my backup bandwidth; choose file types and folders to exclude; set my own encryption key; and set basic scheduling options.
• Price — My choice came down to BackBlaze and SpiderOak. At retail, SpiderOak would have cost me $100/yr. Backblaze $50/yr. Like many people, I am doing my best to try to conserve some money, make appropriate purchase decisions. And while I really believe SpiderOak is a player in this space, a lot of my decision, maybe sadly, was based upon cost. Backblaze is a legitimate player and the cost was right — especially after the 10% Chris Pirillo discount, which sealed the deal for me. (To be fair, you can find 10% discounts for SpiderOak and there are even some 20% discounts out there if you are resourceful)
• Allows me to backup external drives — As I write this, I am backing up content on an external firewire drive connected to my MacBook Pro. This drive is partitioned 3 ways, holding my Time Machine backups, SuperDuper backups and data that I just didn’t want taking up space on my primary 120GB MacBook Pro drive (e.g., videos). Backblaze does not allow you to backup your Time Machine data (seems reasonable), but I am backing up about 42 GB of data. I am 7GB into that process, which, probably expectedly, is taking just a tad longer than the primary hard drive.
• Backup speed — The throttling mechanism is very useful and seems to work. With various degrees of throttling used in the 8 days, average 12 hours/day time it took me to backup 42.5 GB of data on my MacBook Pro, I average about 0.45 GB (450 MB) per hour. That seems pretty good to me.
• Restore — I tested restore just a little bit. Seemed straightforward and easy. You log into the website. Enter your private encryption key if you decided to use it. Choose what directories/files you want. Then click Restore. An email comes to you really quickly saying a zip file with all the files you chose is ready to be downloaded. If you need a bunch of your stuff urgently, and can’t wait for download, you can also order, at extra cost, an overnight shipped DVD or USB drive of your data (see below why this could be an issue, though).

All that said, I do not believe Backblaze is perfect. Here are some items I think need improvement:

• Multiple Computer Support — Backblaze would be near perfect if it allowed multiple computer support on one subscription a la SpiderOak and others. While 95% of my time is spent on my MacBook Pro (because I can run both OS X and Windows), I do have another HP laptop. It would be nice if I could just add that computer to current subscription. But, while I can add the HP to my current Backblaze account, I would have to pay another $50/yr. So instead, if I want to backup items from that machine, I use an intermediary like DropBox or SpiderOak (which both offers 2GB of space free) and then access those items from my MacBook Pro to be backed up on BackBlaze.
• Unencrypted Data on Their Media Restore — Sort of a good cop, bad cop here. It is actually very cool that Backblaze offers the option to get your data on hard media, overnight. But the problem is that your data comes to you *unencrypted*. Me, I would be a little bit apprehensive of FedEx having a drive that has all my data readily accessible. I believe BackBlaze is working on a solution to alleviate this issue, but nothing has been announced publicly. That said, most providers don’t offer this capability anyway, so it is a nice-to-have feature. And most people restore their data through download anyway.

So in summary, I believe Backblaze, while imperfect and a relatively new service (especially on the Mac support front) provides a great service. It offers great functionality at a very good price. And I have seen no major issues with the service thus far. And, they seem willing to communicate with you if needed. I have signed up for a year commitment. SpiderOak was a very close second, and, in the end, primarily came down to financials as to why I chose Backblaze over them. I think they are pretty even on all other aspects as for what I require in an online backup provider.

Now I just hope that I am a paid user and they have lured me in, they still won’t mind the occasional Tweet every now and then

[Update 3: After tweeting Backblaze about me not being able to use their service because of no Mac support -- I get a reply inviting me to their private beta. Thanks Backblaze! But now my decision is that much harder ]

[Update 2: I just realized that Backblaze does not currently have a publicly available Mac version. That rules them out, for now]

[Update: I have received two more candidate possibilities from Twitter of all places. ScottBourne of Mac fame recommended BackJack which looks interesting, but maybe a bit overkill for me. SpiderOak_Inc must have seen my posts and recommended SpiderOak, and, while I was wary and had never heard of them, their service is quite compelling, especially the zero knowledge policy. And here I thought I had almost made my decision].

Back in December, I wrote about my desire to choose an online backup service. Since then, I am still without a true service (I am doing some hodgepodge things right now to give me some semblance of offsite backup; but nothing very formal).

The desire to choose one is still there; and for whatever reason, I really wanting to choose one like right now.

I have narrowed my choices down to 4:

• Carbonite (they finally have a Mac client; plus I can support Leo Laporte and TWiT since Carbonite sponsors Leo’s awesome and free podcasts)
• Backblaze (they are less known, but get great reviews; plus their front page “ad” is kinda cool —- Mac version currently closed to public, but I have beta invite)
• SafeCopy (I believe they are quite new, but people have given them thumbs up; but are they too new??)
• DropBox (There free service is actually quite compelling; I use it….but I think they are the costliest of the bunch here when it comes to getting more storage)

[Mozy -- you are out because you still cannot handle encrypted files from what I understand -- prove me wrong!]

Let me give you my current thought process:

Use the free version of DropBox to share files between my Windows laptop and my MacBook Pro, and then use Carbonite to backup offsite. I would need DropBox because Carbonite and many others only allow you to register one computer for backup, so I would use DropBox to move files I want backed up from my Windows computer over to the Mac (which will be my primary, registered computer). But, something like a SafeCopy would allow me to have unlimited computers registered because their pricing is based on storage.

So help me out. I would appreciate it. I would especially appreciate any representatives from the above companies coming by and selling me on their service.

Thanks!

I have two primary machines. An HP dv5t running Windows Vista and a MacBook Pro running OS X Leopard (to be fair, I use my Mac a lot more than my HP lately). Anyway, I backup both machines locally to external hard drives. That seems like a sensible thing to do.

But what happens if a catastrophe happens and the external drives melt down, burn in a fire or get stolen. It seems prudent to have an offsite storage or backup plan.

While this seems obvious, I am having the damnedest time trying to figure out which service to use. Here are my optimal criteria for any service, in order of importance:

1. Mac and PC compatible
2. Secure upload and download transactions (e.g., 128-bit SSL)
3. Secure online storage (e.g., 256-bit AES encryption)
4. Allows encrypted or password-protected files to be uploaded and stored
5. Allowing both archiving and incremental backups
6. Initial X number of GB of free storage; or at the very least a lengthy free trial
7. Ability to choose a personal encryption key or use a service provided one
8. Ability to upload files via a web interface and a desktop client
9. Decent upload speeds (i.e., no throttling before 1 Mbps)
10.   Flexible subscription plans (e.g., discounts for yearly payments, different monthly plans for the amount of storage you need, ability to change plans at will)

I haven’t found a service that meets all of the above requirements, nor do I expect to. However, I am still having trouble choosing one. Below is a list of possibilities. The ones that are struck out I have tried or researched and decided it won’t work for the reason specified. The ones in red are on the verge of being discounted for the reason specified. The others I have not tried yet.

• Mozy (cannot upload encrypted files, especially Mac encrypted disk images)
• Apple MobileMe (uploads to iDisk are not transferred via SSL when using the browser. I am not sure of the protocol when uploading directly from Finder. Relatively expensive per year)
• Microsoft SkyDrive
• iDrive (Looks promising)
• DropBox (Looks promising)
• Carbonite (no Mac client)
• Slicehost (This is my webhost. Is it wise to use a webhost as a backup mechanism, even though you might change hosts down the line??)
• Amazon S3 (Cost prohibitive?)
• iBackup
• ElephantDrive
• Box.Net
• JungleDisk
• <Other???>

Any suggestions? Am I missing some criteria?

I would appreciate the help.