Crashplan ends home subscriptions!

[MustISO]

Important Changes to
CrashPlan® for Home Service

Effective August 22, 2017, Code42 will no longer offer new – or renew – CrashPlan for Home subscriptions, and we will begin to sunset the product over several months.
CrashPlan for Home will no longer be available for use starting October 23, 2018.

At Code42, protecting your data is important to us. As we shift our business strategy to focus exclusively on enterprise and small business segments, you have two great options to continue getting the best backup solution.

Please read on to determine how this change will impact your CrashPlan for Home subscription and what steps you should take to ensure a smooth transition to a new backup solution.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Finishing out existing subscriptions, and 75% a 1-year Small Business subscription (actually makes it cheaper than the Home service was.)

And they'll help you transition to Carbonite.

I'm miffed, but they're being reasonable about it, IMO.

 

[Elixer]

You forgot the URL? https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/consumer/nextsteps/

They say you should switch to Carbonite, or pay $10/month on the new 'Small business plan'.

Unsure how they will transfer the data to Carbonite, or if that is even an option.

 

[MustISO]

Finishing out existing subscriptions, and 75% a 1-year Small Business subscription (actually makes it cheaper than the Home service was.)

And they'll help you transition to Carbonite.

I'm miffed, but they're being reasonable about it, IMO.

It's reasonable until the 1 year special pricing is done. 4 PCs at 10/mo is pretty expensive for home use. I've known people who used Carbonite and it was pretty awful when I saw it in action. Seemed way more resource intensive than it needed to be.

 

[Polar2002]

I just uninstalled it. Past experiences says company going downhill.

 

[whm1974]

I really hate this subscription model for software. What ever happen with just buying an application outright?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I really hate this subscription model for software. What ever happen with just buying an application outright?

The software is free. (For real - you can download it and use it locally all you want.) You're renting space on their servers. That costs money.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

It's reasonable until the 1 year special pricing is done. 4 PCs at 10/mo is pretty expensive for home use. I've known people who used Carbonite and it was pretty awful when I saw it in action. Seemed way more resource intensive than it needed to be.

Home Use was $5/mo to back up a single system. If you have more boxes than that (and who doesn't?) you were already paying at least $10/mo.

I was cheating by backing up my NAS, so my price is going up, but I don't see this effecting too many people negatively.

Crashplan's client was a gooey Java app too. I can't imagine Carbonite's being worse.

 

[whm1974]

The software is free. (For real - you can download it and use it locally all you want.) You're renting space on their servers. That costs money.

Thanks for pointing that out. However my views on the software subscription model still stands.

 

[ElFenix]

well, crap.

 

[SkyLinx]

I've used them for many years and now I don't trust them anymore. I am trying now CloudBerry with Backblaze B2 as storage backend. It's cheap and supports both Linux and local backups. I tried Carbonite in the past and it lost my data when I had to do a restore.

 

[PliotronX]

Dammit, it has been good to me for my uses and I wanted to stay away from backblaze after they ruined external drives for everybody by shucking en masse.

 

[SkyLinx]

I gave up on CloudBerry because it doesn't let me select/unselect specific hidden files and directories and doesn't seem to recognise symlinks correctly (I'm using Linux).

Now I'm trying JungleDisk with Amazon S3 Europe (Ireland). Backup seems fast but it's gonna be a lot more expensive due to S3 fees.... it seems like it would be easier to remain with Crashplan but as I said I kinda don't trust them anymore...

 

[Yakk]

Bites... Carbonite is ok for continuous backup and their phone app is alright, but their restore feature is absolutely horrible. To the point of being useless if you have to many files to go through.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Backup seems fast but it's gonna be a lot more expensive due to S3 fees.... it seems like it would be easier to remain with Crashplan but as I said I kinda don't trust them anymore...

I'm having a hard time understanding this logic unless I'm missing something. So, Crashplan makes a strategic business move and IMO, bends over backwards for the home users (my understanding is 75% off the first year AFTER your current sub expired, which they also added an extra 2 months to for free) and yet, you "don't trust them" and are complaining about having to use a much more expensive solution?

I've used Crashplan for years to back up my main server. It has been "OK" but backup speeds generally suck. I stayed with it because it was cheap and unlimited storage. This gives me an opportunity to explore other options including their own small business plan to see if I can get a faster option at or below the $10/month cost I'd be paying after all the promos end. What DOES suck is that they apparently will only migrate 5TB of data from your home plan to the small business plan and since I have more than that, I'm going to have to back up the missing stuff again. If their small business solution doesn't have better upload speeds, I'll look to Backblaze.

 

[tnt118]

I find this super annoying but a I guess it's a reality of our dependence on companies that provide cloud services. I'm lucky though in that I started a year subscription only a month ago, so with the bonus months and a year of small business at a discount it'll be over two years before I need to find an alternative. I put off replacing my NAS though and I'm not over the 5TB migration limit but I feel for those who get hit hard by this. Just a couple of weeks ago I was telling people how good of a service they offered compared to others.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

I also have quite a large amount of data in CrashPlan, and will be shopping alternative. I harbor no ill will whatsoever. Crashplan Home (and many inexpensive backup options) are a losing battle for a lot of of companies. There's lots of reports on cloud services trying to stay solvent. Home backup, and music streaming services are two of the bigger ones still trying to find a model that works.

Look at it this way. CrashPlan gets $10 / month per device on the Small Business Plan, containing users with data, that per small business, is usually fairly static, and low intensity (the users aren't downloading TB's of the latest Game of Thrones / Walking Dead episodes and then backing them up because they don't set any profiles).

Compare that to their Home service, which either has a bunch of technologically illiterate people blasting support with silly inquiries over the simplest of things that are probably explained in their FAQ, or technologically savvy people who are specifically taking advantage of the fact that they can pay <$5 a month to lock up TB's and TB's of Storage in the cloud, a cost that they will never recoup from a small percentile of users.

The choice to transition to one and let the other model go isn't that difficult of a choice to make IMO. Over 80% of CrashPlans revenues are from Business. A company wouldn't simply decide however to give up the remaining 20% of its Revenue unless there was a Business Case for it, and it it's assumption, but it appears fairly obvious. With over 5 Exabytes of Data in Crashplan Datacenters, I bet a non-trivial amount of that data is Home user Data. Probably more than is used by their Business customers. The purging of this data will provide additional growth for Business customers without cost, and those users filling that space with their data will be paying substantially more for the privilege.

I'm definitely saddened to see them go, but I don't blame them for making the choice at all.

 

[Yakk]

With Crashplan gone and Carbonite not a viable option if care about restoring large amounts of data, there's always Amazon Glacier and I've also done some beta testing with STORJ in the past for cloud backups. Storj in a Blockchain based encrypted distributed cloud backup solution. You can either pay, or can rent out some of your own storage in return for what you use. Or you can rent or your extra storage for (small) profit, like mining but with HD storage instead of GPUs. Blockchain based encryption makes it as secure as it can get and open source code you can review and compile yourself on Github if you don't trust it. Works well, but expect to use a very impressively HIGH amount of bandwidth depending on your use & renting of storage, doesn't work for people with data caps.

 

[ElFenix]

so, where should i move my backup to? i'm *probably* keeping the backups to only the one computer.

 

[Viper GTS]

I was definitely one of the ones abusing CrashPlan, On top of four or five desktop clients I used their linux client to backup the important parts of my FreeNAS storage via read only NFS mounts. Now that FreeNAS supports cloud storage providers I have switched that over to BackBlaze B2. My individual machines are still on CrashPlan but I'll probably move them to BackBlaze too, the only question is do I use BackBlaze natively or into B2 with CloudBerry or similar ($95/two year unlimited vs $50 one time with B2 costs).

Viper GTS