I'd posted last week about my deliberations on what to do now that Crashplan had announced that they would be ending all home accounts and only supporting business accounts.
As I mentioned in that post, there have several cloud backup services that previously offered unlimited storage have either gone out of business or changed their pricing models, which makes me concerned for the long-term viability of the model. Because of that, I was doing a trial of Backblaze's B2 cloud service and Arq Backup as the backup software on my Macs. I noted that I wasn't completely happy with this solution.
After some further deliberation and number crunching, I ended up sticking with Crashplan but upgraded to the small business account. On paper, this was going to be significantly more expensive at $10/month; I have 3 Macs that I backup with Crashplan and was previously paying $12/month on the family plan. However, Crashplan was offering a 1 year 75% discount on their small business account so for the short-term I'm actually going to save money and this buys me another year to consider my options more thoroughly and to possibly cut over to a new service in the interim without the looming threat of my current backups ending.
So let's look at the other options I did consider:
Backblaze
This may still be the overall winner for me long-term. I wasn't completely happy with the way Arq was handling my backups but the B2 service seems overall good and I can also add some files from my NAS to the same service so that's a possibility. Alternatively, I could opt for backing up my computers with their regular backup service and get some of the features I felt were missing from B2. Longer-term, maybe I can hope that they'll expand the B2 service to cover some of the gaps, or allow for a shift over to something closer to B2's storage-based pricing, or ideally even allow me to port my backups over to B2. That's a bit of speculation. The lack of a richer restore function is still a bit of a concern, but the ability to have a drive mailed to me is nice.
Carbonite
I considered it, but there's several deal breakers here. I could never quite tell if adopting an existing machine would require a re-uploading the data or not, but the big one for me was the ridiculous pricing that would require me to pay more money just to backup an external drive. On top of that, I'd also have to manually enable any large files for backup. The whole thing just seemed too clunky and the pricing felt punitive. They're really not doing themselves any favours in this regard as far as I'm concerned. Crashplan and Backblaze have clear, up front pricing, and it's 1 tier for the features. Carbonite just didn't stack up as a viable option in my mind.