While I’ve never used their service, CrashPlan was always on my radar as a competent home backup solution. I really liked the peer-to-peer element on top of their centralized cloud backup, the more options the better, right?
Sadly for its users, CrashPlan is formerly exiting the consumer market. While it’s never a welcome sight to lose a service, I think CrashPlan is approaching it pretty well. I’d much rather have a planned transition than have a service I enjoy languish without updates before being unceremoniously killed.
Instead, CrashPlan for Home users have over a year to migrate their backups to another service. If they choose not to, they’ll be migrated to CrashPlan’s persisting small business tier, which is more expensive, but not altogether outrageous for consumers.
Other web services companies should take note of how to handle their business when making a similar shift in focus.
Dan Frith comments:
The Problem
I recently received an email from the CrashPlan for Home Team and have included some of the text below:
“Thank you for being a CrashPlan® for Home customer. We’re honored that you’ve trusted us to protect your data.
It’s because of this trust that we want you to know that we have shifted our business strategy to focus on the enterprise and small business segments. This means that over the next 14 months we will be exiting the consumer market and you must choose another option for data backup before your subscription expires. We are committed to providing you with an easy and efficient transition.”
You may or may not recall (or care) that I moved from Mozy to BackBlaze when Mozy changed their pricing scheme. I then moved to CrashPlan when a local (to Australia) contact offered me an evaluation of their seed service. Since then I’ve been pretty happy with CrashPlan, and had setup some peer to peer stuff with Mat as well.
Read more at: Moving From CrashPlan Back To BackBlaze
I just thought I’d share my recent experience of Backblaze. Having to migrate from Crashplan like you, I tried the free trial with Backblaze. It seemed brilliant. I went on to pay for a year up front. It was only then that I noticed that some folders and files were actually not being backed up at all. I wouldn’t have noticed this except that I wanted to retrieve a particular version of a file, and found that no versions at all were there. On closer inspection, around one tenth of my folders weren’t there, even though Backblaze said it had backed everything up. To cut a long story short, a month of going to and fro with their technical support, several rescans and reinstallations later, they could not diagnose the problem. The missing files/folders were simply random. I eventually asked for and received a refund from them.
Whilst it is a beautifully simple solution, it seems to be fatally flawed. No-one wants to spend their life going through an online backup to make sure all their files are there!