Why I'll never buy a hard drive again

You can buy a 1 terabyte hard drive for about a hundred bucks these days. (Pause while you consider just how amazing the steady drop of storage costs really is.)

Once you have a backup drive, of course, the next step is actually using the damn thing. You’ve got to ensure you’re regularly backing up your files to your hard drive, or it’s a functionless paperweight.

I’m great at this with my desktop; I leave several backup drives connected, and regular recurrent processes (like Apple’s Time Machine and Shirt Pocket Software’s SuperDuper) handle the necessary backup duties. 

But I recently switched to using my MacBook Pro as my main machine. It’s more powerful than my 2006-era iMac by a large margin. With my laptop, though, constant backup is more annoying. I don’t want a pricey Time Capsule (Apple’s wireless backup drive), and I don’t love needing to continually mount and unmount external drives to the laptop to keep my backups current.

So, instead, I signed up for  CrashPlan.com. (It’s one of many companies in the cloud-based backup space, competing with Mozy, BackBlaze, and others. I picked it first because it was Macworld’s favorite, and second because it best matched my exact needs and pricing preference.) For $50/year (since I prepaid for three years in advance), I can backup any computers in my home, or in my immediate family’s ownership, with unlimited amounts of storage.

Software on the computers keeps the backups fresh. (Obviously, the initial backups are the biggest/slowest, but once you’ve completed that multi-day process, CrashPlan’s software only backs up changed files, so the data transfer decreases dramatically.) I can login to the website and verify that the backups are still chugging away, or launch the desktop client to confirm the same thing.

I like knowing that I’m backed up remotely, externally, and above all: Regularly. CrashPlan’s own redundancy and security is better than I can provide on my own by a large margin. 
And I really like paying just $50/year and never needing to worry about my own hard drives again.