Crashplan ditches consumers, kills off “for Home” cloud backup service

I love the irony of their tagline. “Protect yourself from the inevitable”, which in this case is the closing down of their “for Home” service. This was a service for consumers, hobbyist photographers and the like to store their data online in the cloud. This way, when the inevitable happens, and they lose it locally, they still have a copy safe and sound floating around the Internet.

Now, users will have to find a new home for their data. Starting yesterday, CrashPlan are no longer renewing or accepting new subscriptions for their “for Home” service. They are honouring current subscriptions, but when they’re over, your data’s gone. So, you’ll want to find a new service and back up to there as quickly as you can.

So, that’s it. If you’re not a business, CrashPlan don’t want to know any more. Either you’ll have to upgrade to a “for Business” account starting at $10/mo, or get lost. If you haven’t downloaded your data by the time your plan ends, it’s gone. But they’ll send you an email to remind you. The plan ends completely, and all subscriptions will have come to an end, on October 23rd, 2018.

There are other services out there that don’t seem to be going anywhere in a hurry, though. For purely photos and video, there’s SmugMug. For a more all-purpose backup, there’s BackBlaze. Although, you’ll have to bear with them. They seem a little overwhelmed since yesterday.

So. Yes. Our website might be a little slow right now. But. Uh. Unexpected traffic is unexpected. https://t.co/yyEXXRQwrg pic.twitter.com/Ts5Jcq37Gy

— Backblaze (@backblaze) August 22, 2017

I’ve always been sceptical of “cloud” backup services. In theory, the idea’s great. In the real world, though, they seem to be constantly screwing each over, or their customers, or going bankrupt. I just don’t trust the cloud. Or, to be more accurate, I don’t trust the people running parts of it. Because stuff like this happens all the time.

While I do have a SmugMug account for some photographs, the majority of my back up is done with Resilio Sync. I am my own cloud. I keep a machine at a separate location. If anything happens here and I lose everything, I can physically go over there, grab the drives, and make fresh copies. Or, I can just add a new drive here and have it restore over the Internet.

Either way, I’m not relying on some other company being able to stay in business or not screw me over.

If you’re looking into a reliable local and remote backup workflow, check out this one we posted recently from Caleb Pike.

[via The Verge]