When comparing CrashPlan vs Amazon S3 , the Slant community recommends CrashPlan for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud backup services?” CrashPlan is ranked 3rd while Amazon S3 is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose CrashPlan is:
You set it up once and from then it runs in the background whenever you are not using your computers (or at specified times).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Unintrusive
You set it up once and from then it runs in the background whenever you are not using your computers (or at specified times).
Pro Supports multiple backup destinations
You can set up different files/folders to back up to specific places.
Pro Differential and incremental file backup
CrashPlan updates only that part of the file that has changed, saving bandwidth and time.
Pro Unlimited online storage
The $5/mo individual plan and the $12.50/mo family plan gets you unlimited cloud storage.
Pro Allows custom encryption keys
Custom 448 bit user-provided encryption key can be used to encrypt the backed up data in the cloud.
Pro Users can order a physical copy of their data
They will send you an external hard drive to your house.
Pro Unlimited revision history
CrashPlan saves all previous versions of a file.
Pro Free for small sites
The free tier will cover most personal home pages.
Pro Easily scalable
There's no cap in storage or traffic. Cost is based on usage.
Pro Super cheap with a year's worth of free service
S3 storage costs $0.03 per GB and gets cheaper the more is stored, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests are $0.005 per 1,000 requests and GET and all other requests are $0.004 per 10,000 requests. And with some restrictions is available for free for a year.
Pro Fast setup
You can provision a S3 bucket, upload files, setup the DNS, and go live in under 10 minutes.
Pro Fast
S3 is fast even without a CDN.
Pro Easy to setup with CDN
Simple to set up with Amazon's CloudFont CDN.
Pro Supports custom root domains
To set up a custom domain, Amazon Route 53 has to be configured as the DNS provider with the domain registrar, two buckets have to be created and configured with the name the same as the domain - one including, one excluding www. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.
Pro No security risks
There's no server to manage, so no security issues to patch or keep watch.
Cons
Con Buggy
Con Home edition discontinued
CrashPlan's home edition will be shut down on October 23, 2018. They are no longer accepting new signups or subscription renewals.
Con Popular features (local backup and trusted offsite backup) no longer available
Con Heavy client
The BackupClient is based on Java and therefore a lot more memory-intensive than most other backup solutions
Con Buggy
Con Credit card needed
Amazon will try to retrieve the money every month after one year trial. If you have no money you will be banned.
Con Setting up automatic public permissions is confusing
By default, S3 sets uploaded files to private. You can configure your S3 bucket to auto-apply public permissions by copying and pasting a template. But the template might be intimidating to some users.
Con Confusing web interface
Amazon S3's web interface is quite confusing, especially for first-time users, but there are many tutorials online that help beginners to set up a static site on S3.
Con No SFTP support
Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used.