My NAS copies everything to a second disk every night at 2 AM. For a long time I called that my backup. It isn’t, and it took an embarrassingly long time to admit it.
A nightly sync saves you from a dead drive. It does nothing about ransomware that encrypts the shares you’re logged into, or the house fire that takes the computer and the disk sitting next to it. The whole case for cloud backup comes down to one thing: an offsite copy that no thief and no crypto locker can reach.
So this week I went through the three names that come up in every backup conversation: Backblaze, IDrive, and Carbonite. What follows is what their pricing actually looks like in 2026, the fine print that caught my eye, and the setup I’d run today. If you want to know who’s behind this site, the About page has the short version.
Key takeaways
- Backblaze charges $99 a year for unlimited backup of one computer, external drives included. No storage math, ever.
- IDrive sells storage pools instead: 5TB from $11.99 a month spread across your whole device fleet, NAS boxes included. First-year discounts reset to standard pricing on renewal.
- Carbonite’s entry plan looks cheapest at $75.99 but skips external drives. The Plus tier most people actually need renews at $131.99.
- Whichever you pick, sync services like Google Drive and Dropbox don’t count as backup. They’ll happily sync your ransomware to the cloud.
How I evaluated these three
First, the honesty part: I haven’t run year-long backups on all three services side by side, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What I did this week was pull each company’s current pricing page, cross-check the numbers against 2026 reviews from PCMag and other testers, and dig through user forums for the complaints that only surface after a real restore attempt. Backup services are easy to compare on paper and easy to get wrong in practice, so the paper is where I’ll stay honest.
One bias worth declaring: I run a Synology NAS at home and OneDrive on my Windows machines, so I read everything here through a how-does-this-fit-around-local-hardware lens. I already trust local copies. What I wanted from each service was a clear answer on what it adds that local hardware can’t.
Backblaze: one price, no storage math
Backblaze Personal Backup runs $99 a year, which works out to about $8.25 a month. That covers one computer with unlimited data, plus any external drives plugged into it. There are no tiers and no per-TB pricing to think about.
That flat pitch is refreshingly boring in a market that loves plan matrices. If you’ve got a 6TB photo library and a shelf of external drives, Backblaze is the only one of the three that won’t make you pause at checkout. Restores run through the desktop app or a browser, and when a full download isn’t practical, Backblaze will ship a restore drive to you and refund the drive fee if you send it back within 30 days.
Two caveats. A license covers a single computer, so a second machine means paying again. And keeping old versions of files indefinitely is a paid add-on rather than something you get by default, which matters if ransomware sits undetected for a while before you notice.
PCMag gave Backblaze a 3.5 “Good” in its March 2026 review, and that tracks with my read of the product: it’s not fancy, it just quietly does the job. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want from infrastructure.
IDrive: the whole-device-fleet option
IDrive works differently. Instead of unlimited data on one machine, you buy a storage pool that every device shares: 5TB costs $11.99 a month, 10TB is $17.99, and pools run up to 50TB. One account covers your PCs, Macs, phones, tablets, and external drives, and IDrive publishes dedicated backup apps for Synology and QNAP NAS boxes, which is rare at consumer prices. There’s a free 10GB plan if you want to poke around first.
The most underrated feature is IDrive Express. The company physically ships you a storage device so your initial backup doesn’t spend three weeks crawling up your home upload pipe, then you ship it back. Personal plans include one free Express transfer a year, and extra requests cost $59.95.
Now the asterisk. IDrive advertises 30% off your first year on annual billing and up to 50% off two-year plans, but the discount applies to the first year only; standard pricing resumes on renewal, a note that sits in small text under the plan picker. What surprised me while researching is how deep those intro discounts actually go. Renewal trackers like Subger list 5TB annual deals that start around $2.95 a month and reportedly renew closer to $9.95. Even at full sticker price the math works out fine, but budget for the jump. There’s also an overage charge of $0.25 per GB per month on Personal plans if you blow past your cap, so set the alerts.
For balance: 10TB at $17.99 monthly runs roughly $216 a year, versus $99 for Backblaze’s unlimited plan, so IDrive wins on value mainly when your pool stays modest. PCMag rated IDrive 4.5 “Outstanding” in March 2026, a stronger score than the 3.5 it gave Backblaze that same month, and reviewers consistently praise how much it packs into one account.
Carbonite: friendly support, read the fine print
Carbonite has been around since 2005 and now operates under OpenText. Its Safe plans all cover one computer: Basic runs $75.99 for the first year (regularly $95.99), Plus is $78.99 (regularly $131.99), and Prime is $96.99 (regularly $161.99), per Carbonite’s own comparison page at the time of writing.
Here’s the catch that trips people up: Safe Basic backs up your internal drive only. External drives require Plus, and automatic video backup waits for Prime. Since most people’s real archives sit on external drives, Plus is the fair comparison against Backblaze, and at a $131.99 renewal it costs about $33 a year more for a feature Backblaze includes at its single price.
What Carbonite offers in return, and this shouldn’t be dismissed, is US-based phone support. If you’re buying backup for a parent who will call a human rather than search a help center, that’s worth real money. Prime also adds courier recovery, where Carbonite ships your data back on a physical drive, built for people who genuinely can’t wait days for a re-download. There’s a 30-day free trial across the lineup, which is a nice touch.
Side by side: the numbers that matter
| Backblaze | IDrive | Carbonite | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price today | $99/year, unlimited | 5TB at $11.99/month | $75.99 to $96.99 first year |
| Renewal | $99 (flat) | Standard pricing, higher than intro | $95.99 / $131.99 / $161.99 |
| Data limit | None | 5TB to 50TB pool | Unlimited (internal drive only on Basic) |
| Computers | 1 per license | Multiple devices, one account | 1 |
| External drives | Included | Included | Plus and Prime only |
| NAS backup | No | Yes (Synology/QNAP apps) | No |
| Standout | No storage math | One pool for the whole fleet | Phone support, courier restore on Prime |
What I’d actually pick
In my experience the failures you actually get are boring ones: a drive that starts clicking one morning, or a laptop that won’t power on at all. The dramatic stuff, ransomware, fire, theft, is rarer but total when it lands. That’s why the sensible answer is a layered setup rather than one hero product.
For one main computer holding anything irreplaceable, Backblaze is the easy call: flat price, unlimited data, external drives covered, nothing to re-evaluate when the photo library doubles. That’s what I’d run on the machines that matter, alongside the Synology NAS I use for local copies. Local sync handles the dead-drive scenario; the cloud tier handles the everything-at-once scenario. Neither covers the other.
If you’re backing up a laptop, a desktop, and a couple of family machines on one subscription, IDrive’s shared pool is the better value. Just calendar the renewal date so the price jump doesn’t ambush you. And if the person being backed up would rather talk to a human than read a help article, Carbonite Plus earns its renewal premium.
One habit worth keeping regardless of service: an occasional snapshot to a drive that isn’t always connected. Something like a Samsung T7 portable SSD that you unplug after copying gives you a copy ransomware can’t touch while it sits in a drawer.
Sync isn’t backup (worth repeating)
I keep running into people who consider their Google Drive or Dropbox folder a backup. It isn’t. A sync service’s job is keeping copies identical, which means it will faithfully propagate a deletion, a corruption, or an encryption event to every device and then to the cloud. File-version history softens the blow, but that’s a safety net, not a backup strategy. We put the big sync services head to head in our Google Drive vs Dropbox vs OneDrive comparison if that’s the road you’re on; just know you’re shopping in a different category.
The bottom line
Most people should start with Backblaze: $99 a year, unlimited, external drives included, no decisions to make after checkout. Multi-device households and home-lab owners should price IDrive’s pool against their actual storage needs and budget for the renewal. Buy Carbonite for the person who will actually use the phone number.
Whatever you choose, the worst backup plan is the one you keep meaning to set up. Pick one this week, let the first backup run overnight, and stop thinking about it.
Affiliate disclosure: some links in this article are tracking links, and buying through them may earn the site a commission at no extra cost to you. All prices were checked against vendor pricing pages in September 2026.