I started working with computers when they were much less reliable than they are now. Old operating and file systems frequently lost or corrupted your data, teaching you the importance of a backup copy. Then the fire at our house reinforced the importance of offsite backups. The $50-150 a year cost is cheap insurance against losing all your creative work, financial and (ahem) insurance records.
A few months after the fire I set up our computers with CrashPlan. We used it at work, and it worked very well at home. But this summer CrashPlan announced they were pulling the plug on home usage, and their commercial offerings weren’t very economic for few home PCs.
CrashPlan gave plenty of warning their home service is discontinued, but watching smoke roll in to Silicon Valley from the 2017 North Bay fires was a grim reminder. To my surprise, it took a few tries to get find a reliable replacement. Here’s my experience.