I just received an email from ElephantDrive informing me that my legacy unlimited storage account will be terminated in 30 days, and that I must select a new plan.
In July 2009 ElephantDrive announced that they are no longer offering their $100 per year unlimited storage plan. ElephantDrive is now offering a $200 per year for 500GB plan.
In February 2011 Mozy announced that they are no longer offering their $55 per year unlimited storage plan. Mozy is now offering a $120 per year for 125GB plan.
In February 2011 Trend Micro SafeSync announced that they are bandwidth throttling large accounts. In March 2011 they announced that they are no longer offering their $35 per year unlimited storage plan. SafeSync is now offering a $150 per year for 150GB plan.
Carbonite offers a $55 per year for unlimited storage plan, but they are bandwidth throttling accounts over 35GB to 512Kbps and accounts over 200GB to 100Kbps access speeds.
AVG LiveKive offers a $80 per year for unlimited storage plan, but the terms of service defines unlimited as 500GB.
BackBlaze offers a $60 per year for unlimited storage plan.
CrashPlan offers a $50 per year for unlimited storage plan.
Neither BackBlaze nor CrashPlan supports their unlimited plan on server class machines.
I currently have 2.1TB of data backed up online with ElephantDrive running on my Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. Needles to say, none of their new plans are affordable for that amount of storage. I either need to significantly trim down what I backup, or I need to find a new unlimited storage provider, that also allows installs on Windows Server.
For now, I’m uninstalling ElephantDrive.
[Update]
CrashPlan’s new v3 software installs and runs fine on Windows Server 2008 R2, and I have switched to using CrashPlan for my backup needs.
Here is an example snippet of the status emails I receive from CrashPlan:
| Source → Target | Selected | Files | Backed Up % |
Last Connected |
Last Backup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VM-STORAGE → CrashPlan Central | 2.1TB ↑1KB | 423k 0 | 100.0% | 2.5 hrs | 4.3 hrs |
Pieter Viljoen's Blog 
My first thought was to use S3 but then i quickly ran it through a calculator and realized that that would be insanely pricey. no wonder these guys can't stay afloat.
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I think they are close to dead. I can't access my back up files and I can't get a response from them in five days of trying.Something seriously wrong in Elephant Drive Land!
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Wow, that is expensive! Google has the cheapest storage cost, but they don't have a backup solution to go with it.. darn it. I personally am on Carbonite, but only backup critical files so have approached no limit. It is interesting they do bandwidth throttling, I did not know that! I would be pissed if I was throttled to 100Kbps!
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Thanks Peiter, I'm currently an "unlimited" SafeSync customer and didn't know they were discontinuing the service. I've got a web hosting service that says unlimited space so I may use that, files aren't encrypted but hey I'm only putting photos on there.
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Keith, you may want to check with your webhosting provider. A lot of times they say unlimited, but they do in fact have a limit on the number of files stored. (if you’re one of the cheap-o plans. For instance, my hostmonster account: (http://www.hostmonster.com/) , states very clearly unlimited storage, but I got notifications from them once I hit 50,000 files that I was exceeding their “unlimited” limits… read the fine print 🙂
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@Keith, just be sure to read the terms of service, all the the unlimited storage web hosting services I looked at restrict the usage to actual web content, and do not allow the space to be used for archiving or backup.
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I should have updated the post a long time ago, but only just did so now.CrashPlan's new v3 software runs fine on Windows Server 2008 R2, I switched to CrashPlan some time ago, currently have 2.1TB backed with them.
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Crashplan has been quite amazing, even running on a Synology with a headless install, I’m backing up over 3Tb of data, and 5 different machines under the family subscription. In my experience, Crashplan remains the most economical service with the most value.
btw, the ProE with a user console, is quite awesome for SMB, FWIW.
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