Homebrew vs Backblaze

Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.

Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.

Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.

Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.

Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.

One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.

Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.

The default configuration includes everything except for system files to be backed up. That also includes external USB drives. This will work for most people. It can, of course, be customized to each person's liking.

There are no limitations of file size or amount of data you can upload. The $5/mo plan gets you unlimited cloud storage.

Backblaze creates a zip file of all your files for you to download, thus decreasing the amount of data you need to download and increasing the speed of the download since it's one connection instead of multiple that need to be opened and closed for a list of files.

AES encrypted files are transferred over a secure SSL connection.

Some backup services like Carbonite require a client to be installed to restore files. Backblaze allows you to login and download any or all files from a web browser, meaning it also serves as an ad-hoc cloud storage platform.

You can have a flash drive or an external hard drive delivered to you. They cost $99 and $189 respectively.