CrashPlan for Small Business Review

CrashPlan for Small Business (also called CrashPlan PRO) is one of our favorite business online backup services for multiple reasons.

While just a few would be impressive, CrashPlan nails the four most important things when it comes to online backup: pricing, security, usability, and speed.

Read on for a detailed look at the plan, price, and features, plus our experience with the service.

How Much Does CrashPlan for Small Business Cost?

Valid January 2021

CrashPlan for Small Business offers just one backup plan, and it's extremely easy to understand how it can be expanded to suit your specific needs.

CrashPlan gives unlimited data for $10.00 /month /computer. It's that easy. A little math will tell you how much it costs to back up more than one computer: Just take $10.00 X # computers to back up.

That means if you're a home user who only needs to back up from a single computer, you can buy CrashPlan for Small Business for just $10 /month to back up that one device.

However, it's equally applicable to a business that might have 5 users, for example, in which case CrashPlan would charge $50.00 /month.

A little math shows that a bigger company that has 25 computers would have a $250.00 /month bill to support those computers. Again, this setup would still allow for unlimited data.

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CrashPlan for Small Business has a free trial option, too, which lets you try the service for 30 days without having to pay the $10.00 /month minimum until the trial is over. In fact, you can back up an unlimited number of devices and use the unlimited storage from your trial account for those 30 days.

You do, however, have to provide a payment method before the trial is activated, but you can always cancel your account before the trial expires if you decide you don't want to pay for CrashPlan.

CrashPlan for Small Business Features

CrashPlan for Small Business is an automatic backup service. Files and folders of your choosing are backed up whenever you want them to be as well as when the CrashPlan software detects a change in that file.

This selective, incremental, and fully automatic backup system keeps the latest version of everything you want to be backed up to CrashPlan's servers without you having to do anything.

Beyond these basic features in CrashPlan, which are part of any real online backup service, you'll find the following features in this online backup plan:

Our Experience With CrashPlan for Small Business

Overall, we love CrashPlan. It's simply one of the better online backup services out there, at least right now. If you'd like some more details about what we like, and don't, about CrashPlan's Small Business online backup plan, read on:

What We Like:

Obviously, the price is easy to understand and isn't too expensive when compared with other online backup solutions. $10 every month, for every device, couldn't be easier to understand, and the fact that you pay that price for unlimited data is wonderful. That's a good deal no matter how you look at it.

As we mentioned in the introduction at the top of the page, we also really like the level of security that they encrypt data with on their servers. Some other online backup services use similar encryption levels so it's not a killer feature in and of itself, but we think it's important to mention that CrashPlan didn't cut corners here.

Their software is extremely easy to use. Most people familiar with any kind of system-level software would be comfortable digging around and setting up an initial backup without any instruction. In other words, it's intuitive, which is important because backing up is so important. Something unnecessary, like hard to use software, just makes backing up less likely to be done properly.

Maybe most importantly, we've found CrashPlan to be speedy in all three areas to look at in an online backup service: file preparation, upload, and download. Granted, much of this can be attributed to your available bandwidth at any given time, but when compared to some other services, we think CrashPlan for Small Business does well here.

A little on upload times: our upload connection regularly tests around 5 Mbps and the initial upload was around 200 GB. That took about five days of upload time, day and night. However, it was all in the background and, aside from a few short moments, we didn't notice a slowdown during our internet usage. Your backup time will depend on a number of factors that you can read more about in our Online Backup FAQ.

Other than that, we enjoyed the advanced, and completely optional, control settings like network utilization, an almost continuous one-minute backup, and very easy initial setup and upload process.

Finally, while this might seem relatively unimportant, as someone who gives advice and teaches about computers, we very, very much appreciated CrashPlan's extensive, to say the least, Frequently Asked Questions page, which can be found here.

What We Don't Like:

There's little not to like about an online backup service like CrashPlan for Small Business when it keeps your important data safe, day in and day out, at a more than fair price.

However, one issue we have with CrashPlan is the inability to backup from a mapped drive in Windows unless you install the program for each user on the computer. However, it shouldn't be a problem to do for most users. CrashPlan explains how to do this here.

Final Thoughts on CrashPlan for Small Business

CrashPlan is priced well and lets you back up everything you want with no versioning limitation. We have no hesitation recommending their plan.

If you're not convinced that CrashPlan for Small Business is right for you, be sure to check out our reviews of Backblaze and SOS Online Backup, some other cloud backup services we really like.

What Happened to CrashPlan Home?

CrashPlan used to have a backup plan called CrashPlan Home that was retired on August 22, 2017. From that date until October 23, 2018, you could restore or migrate your data elsewhere.

However, now that you can no longer use CrashPlan Home, the company recommends using a different online backup service like Carbonite, or to subscribe to CrashPlan for Small Business.