(credit: Jeff Kubina)
Cloud-based backup provider CrashPlan—which our friends at the Wirecutter recommended in 2015—announced earlier this week that it was getting out of the consumer backup game to focus on its enterprise offerings. Customers have until October 22, 2018 to find alternative backup solutions.
CrashPlan’s service was compelling because it was inexpensive—$ 60 per year for a single computer—offered unlimited storage, and had a good (if not great) client for both backup and restore operations. It’s recommending its customers switch to either its small business plan, which doubles the price to $ 120, or to Carbonite. Carbonite has a $ 60 plan that’s comparable (and migrating CrashPlan users get a 50 percent discount on that price), if a little less convenient (it won’t automatically back up files greater than 4GB, though they can be manually backed up), but has a functional deficit relative to CrashPlan. While Carbonite supports versioning (so that you can restore older copies of your files) and a personal encryption key, it only does this when using its Windows client. The macOS client lacks both features.
CrashPlan isn’t the first cloud backup company to shake up its offerings in a way that leaves customers unhappy. In 2011, for example, the popular Mozy service dropped its $ 5/month unlimited cloud backup plan, replacing it with a $ 6/month 50GB plan. Non-backup services have also struggled; Bitcasa, for example, launched in 2011 with an unlimited cloud storage offering for $ 10/month or $ 100/year. In 2013, this price was raised to $ 1,000/year, and in 2014 the company dropped the unlimited plan entirely. In 2015, Microsoft dropped its unlimited OneDrive storage plan.
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