Crashplan ditches consumers, kills off “for Home” cloud backup service
Aug 23, 2017
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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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]
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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8 responses to “Crashplan ditches consumers, kills off “for Home” cloud backup service”
This is a real shame… I still haven’t decided what to do. I paid for a year in advance (family plan), I have until the end of the year to go elsewhere. Ugh. But it will take time to start backups on new services, so I need to start soon.
I’m not a professional photographer (just a silly amateur), so I don’t have the time, energy, and cash to set up a custom cloud solution. I need something turn-key that just works without having to fiddle with it.
So that leaves the options as following, really:
– Carbonite (and CrashPlan offers to migrate the data it seems)
– BackBlaze
I’m certainly leaning to BackBlaze, but I need to decide soon.
I switched from Crashplan to a Microsoft Office 365 subscription which includes 1 TB of cloud space over two years ago and am pretty happy with it. This way I only pay about 25 $ per year (as you can find discounted subscriptions on eBay etc.) and it is seemlessly integrated in Windows 10.
Yes, I also have 1 TB on OneDrive, but I don’t consider the that kind of specific syncing to be a good replacement for the kind of generic and “it just works” backup that CrashPlan provided. (although sometimes CrashPlan also stopped backing up for some reason)
It works for many people, though, and it is certainly better than nothing! :)
Another option is Backblaze B2 + Cloudberry. This is where you use the business storage on Blackberry (very affordable, no 30day limit) and Cloudberry software on your computer (lots of features, encryption etc…)
I wrote up a post on how I use it for photography. For the true backup (no 30 day delete) scroll down to the “Advanced Way”.
http://www.sidecarphoto.co/best-online-backup-photographers/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=comment
I use BB and have been very happy with it. It’s not my primary backup but one of several I use. I use Karenware Replicator, an oldie but goodie (though has not been updated in years since Karen’s passing). But it’s stable and works. All my data is backedup to the cloud, my Linux file server and on several portable drives. In case of emergency I can just grab the 4TB drive and run.
I would understand it if they went out of business for whatever reason. This is just a money grab. Why didn’t they just raise the price a few dollars and leave people alone? This is just “go away.” There is no difference between business data and consumer data. Data is Data. I back up 4 TB to them which takes months and now I have to start over again. Nice Code 42. Added to the never do business or recommend them to anyone list.
Unlimited online backup is no more than a scam to attract users, I started with Carbonite in 2008, then when I reached 200GB of backup at the end of 2010 they evidently started to throttle the bandwidth used for my uploads. Then at the beginning of 2011 I switched to the unlimited three years plan of mozy, after a few months they cancelled the unlimited plan but I remained with them for the whole (prepaid) plan hoping they could change in the future, it didn’t happen. So in 2014 I switched to CrashPlan for Home and I renewed the unlimited subscription for a year a few weeks ago. Now it is again time to find another startup offering unlimited plan, knowing from now that will not be unlimited anymore in three years… If this is the game they want to play, let’s play!
I have until 7-18 to decide I have tried others a while ago didn’t like backblaze as it was too wonky. Who knows what any of thses companies will do going forward?