CrashPlan exiting home backup market

MOH

CrashPlan are switching to a business only service.
Not taking new customers or renewals, switching existing customers to business accounts (which I believe don't include backup to your own remote machine ) on Oct 22nd, until the subscroption ends.

They're recommending Carbonite and arranging discounts for CrashPlan customers, BackBlaze is another option.

cormie

I've been lazy to make a decision on this. I remember I did tonnes of research between all the diff companies originally and crashplan came out on top so I signed up with them. I was only with them a few weeks when I got notice that they are discontinuing their home sub. I forget how much their home user sub was per year, but the small business one seems to be $10 per month per system, so $120 a year. Carbonite I think is $60, but crashplan seems a lot more comprehensive and not restrictive both with speeds and size of files that get backed up etc.

I'm thinking I might just stick with crash plan for the extra cost.

If anyone knows of a similar home back up service that will do everything crash plan does, but cheaper, but still reliable for the long term, please share.

MOH

The one thing Crashplan did that I haven't been able to find anywhere else is the history of deleted files. Every other service seems to delete them after 30 days max, but Crashplan keeps them indefinitely. So e.g. I had a 1TB external drive I had backed a load of stuff up from, but which I didn't want to keep connected to the PC all the time. With Crashplan that was no problem, could leave it unplugged for a year but still access the data under 'deleted files'. I don't think anybody else offers the same.

I ended up setting up a Carbonite account for someone else who's not that technical - the default settings cover Documents, Desktop, Pictures, etc - all the usual places most people will save stuff.

For myself I went with Backblaze for the regular backups, since I felt it offered a bit more configurability, and Backblaze B2 for cold storage backups of stuff like the few hundred gig that was on that external drive (mainly old photos). The costs for cold storage backup have come down an awful lot over the last few years. It's down to something like a cent per GB for downloads, so even if I needed to restore everything it still wouldn't cost that much.
The interface is absolutely awful though. They don't have a native client, and the web interface is practically unusable. They are supported by a number of third party clients though, so it's a matter of trying those out until you find one that works for you.

cormie

Thanks a lot for the reply! Yeah, that situation with the ext hard drive and deleted files I think I remember being a reason why I went with crashplan too. There was some good reason I wanted files that may have been deleted off my pc, to still be accessible through crashplan, I forget the reason now though :pac:

Can I ask why you went with backblaze instead of just going for the crashplan business deal? What's the price difference and do you feel the extra features and usability of crashplan just weren't worth the extra price?

I'm leaning towards just going with crashplan for small business now. I did so much research into it in the first place and chose crashplan after much deliberation, so would feel like I'm not getting the best I need if I went somewhere else now.

Also, what do you mean "cold storage" ?

Xterminator

Mozypro is an alternative thats worth checking out.

MOH

I can’t check at the moment, but I think the price difference was high enough that I decided to leave Crashplan rather than switch to their business plan.

There’s stuff that changes regularly that you want to keep backed up, like your word documents, spreadsheets, the kind of stuff you might be changing on a regular basis. That’s the kind of thing that most backup services are fairly good at handling. They’ll sometimes keep a few versions too so if you make a mess of your word document there’ll be a backup from yesterday or last week you can revert back to.

Then there’s things like years’ worth of photos, or my external hard drive with loads of stuff on it, that you’re not using or changing on a regular basis but you still want a copy of in case something happens to the original. You don’t care about versions or anything like that, or accessing it in a hurry, you just want the piece of mind of knowing there’s a copy somewhere else. It’s probably more like archiving than backing up. That’s what I mean by cold storage.

For things like photos, obviously the volume of data being stored is a lot higher than for documents and spreadsheets. For a regular backup solution, covering that amount of data is possibly going to get quite expensive. Cold storage is generally a lot cheaper to upload and store – the downside is that downloading it again can usually be expensive. But given you’d only be doing that in an emergency if you’ve lost all your other copies, it’s a fair trade-off. And even the cost of that has come down a lot in the last couple of years.

Just came across a bit of a rant but discussion of some options here.

cormie

Thanks again for the info

I read that rant, I don't think it'll really affect the way I use it. I actually use Google Drive (Backup and Sync) in conjunction with Crashplan. So crashplan backs up the disk image of everything, and then everything I work on, is stored in Backup and Sync, so all documents etc are all arranged and laid out to be worked on and from the backed up folders. So in the case of any need for quick access and restoring of any files, I have them on Google Drive AND Crashplan.

So I think I'll probably just stick with Crashplan for business. It'll be $120 a year after the first year, but it's worth it for that peace of mind