“Code42, the company behind the CrashPlan online backup service, stopped accepting new subscribers for its CrashPlan for Home plan on Tuesday, with the backup firm shifting its focus away from consumers to enterprise and small business customers,” Malcolm Owen reports for AppleInsider. “The CrashPlan website advises users that, effective as of August 22, Code42 will no longer accept new CrashPlan for Home subscriptions nor renewals of existing subscriptions. The sunsetting of the service will apparently take place over several months, with CrashPlan for Home expected to cease on October 23, 2018. ”
“The service will continue to honor existing CrashPlan for Home subscriptions during this time, and has extended customer subscriptions at no extra cost by 60 days, to give users time to transition to a new backup system,” Owen reports. “For customers wanting to stay with the service, Code42 suggests they move over to CrashPlan for Small Business, which costs $10 per month per device.Customers choosing this option will have their data moved over and will be able to use CrashPlan for Small Business for the remainder of their current Home subscription for free, followed by a 75 percent discount off the service for the following 12 months.”
“Carbonite is being offered as an alternative option, selected as an ‘exclusive partner’ to Code42 for home users,” Owen reports. Just as with CrashPlan for Small Business, subscribers are being offered a price cut for switching services to Carbonite, this time a discount of 50 percent.”
More info and links in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: CrashPlan for Home (or other CrashPlan users) and/or Carbonite users, what’s your opinion of the service(s)?
I have used CrashPlan for Home for at least fives years and have 2.1T stored with them. I have been pleased with their reliability, customer service and cost. On the surface it looks like migrating to their Small Business plan is easiest and less costly than Carbonite.
Unless you have more than one machine then it gets expensive real fast. They should really let people on that plan keep it.
I have all my machines store their data on one external NAS with a raid array. I then sync that drive from one computer to Crashplan. The computer is a fixed desktop Mac Mini which serves mainly for this purpose and a few misc. tasks. Problem solved. I’m not a big user so the minimal account costs for Crashplan will suit my needs just fine.
I’ve had Crashplan for longer than I can remember. I renewed my subscription after the first four years. I’ll stick with them now with this new service. We all fled Carbonite like our like our asses were on fire back in the day. Although Crashplan suffers from one major problem – dependency on Java for their client side application on Mac OS and Windows. This is something I complained about for a very long time and the promises so far of a native Mac OS X client have been empty. I’d really like to give Java the heave ho like I did with Flash after Steve Job’s said it sucked. Don’t miss Flash and I won’t miss Java either! So hopefully now that the service is more expensive they’ll fix this major flaw. We really need a native client app!!!
BackBlaze!
Yea if you want to start over and lose all your version history.
NO. I and others have been burned by BackBlaze when they’ve lost track of our backups. In my case, they attempted to blame me for losing my encryption key, despite my having my key at hand to this day! Rather than admit their error or bother to fix it, they told me to get lost while tossing back at me my unused account payment. I could never recommend them, whereas I have never had trouble with DropBox or Box (although neither of them are exactly perfect for Mac users).
I chose CrashPlan a few years ago because it offered to backup not only my iMac but an external drive attached to it that had a lot of important data – all for no extra cost. I fear Carbonite will be a lot more expensive. I still have over 6 months left on my CP account so I will look closer at it the beginning of next year.
I have used CrashPlan Family for well over 5 years, backing up 10 computers, one of which, the MacPro Video editing station has 8 TB of data.
Carbonite is not a solution as they only give 250 gigs of storage at the base price and then it’s $79 for each additional 100 gigs. I couldn’t even backup just the data in my MacBook Pro 15 ” with less than 512 gigs (I have a Tb total).
However, CrashPlan is only 1/3 of my backup strategy, as I have alternating clones of all the critical drives that go back and forth to a safe deposit box, one in and one out. But that can easily be 2 weeks behind. Crashplan was there up to date insurance plan for that in terms of off site backup. (the other 1/3 is local time machine)
I’ll probably stick with Crashplan business, but just for my two most critical computers and be more strict with the bank clones.
But that decision won’t have to be made for another 10.6 months.
Overall I’m disappointed.
I’ve been a user and advocate of off-site storage ever since both a MacBook and its backup drive were stolen from my home. I used BackBlaze for a while, encountered some glitches, and switched to CrashPlan.
With CrashPlan now dropping Home users, I’m wondering whether iCloud storage alone would be adequate for securing everything I would need to recover if my MBP is damaged or stolen. Thoughts?
I switched to Arq from CrashPlan last year. Not a regret.
https://www.arqbackup.com
Arq backup.
https://www.arqbackup.com/