Many of our clients know the importance of backups and use CrashPlan for Home. We have recommended it for years to many of our clients—particularly those with many users as CrashPlan had the best pricing structure of all the cloud backup providers for their “Home” version and it worked well as a solution for small businesses. However it was announced on August 22, 2017, Code42 will no longer offer new – or renewed – CrashPlan for Home subscriptions, and will begin to sunset the product over several months.
Code42 will honor existing CrashPlan for Home subscriptions, however, they will no longer be available for use starting October 23, 2018. Code42 adds, “To allow you time to transition to a new backup solution, we’ve extended your subscription (at no cost to you) by 60 days.” Any subscription that extends beyond October 22, 2018, CrashPlan will automatically upgrade their account to the Small Business plan before the end-of-support date. Of course, Code42 is offering all existing home subscriptions to upgrade to the CrashPlan for Small Business (which costs $10 per month per device) with an enticing 75% discount off the service for the first 12 months.
Connectech feels that $10/month per device is a bit on the expensive side for cloud backup services for residential and small business clients.
Those of us subscribed to one of these plans have received notices from CrashPlan offering to upgrade to their Small Business version at what will ultimately be $10 a month per device. They’ve also suggested that home/family customers switch to Carbonite at what will ultimately be $5 per month per device.
We are evaluating a number of possible alternatives, but for those whose subscription is expiring in the next few months, we wanted to offer our favorite recommendation of Backblaze. Backblaze is $50 per device per year. Backblaze is extremely reliable and operates trouble-free from our experience with other customers. It’s also very Mac-like with the controls/settings in an Apple System Preferences pane.
Take a look at Backblaze’s response to CrashPlan’s announcement, An Invitation for CrashPlan Customers: Try Backblaze. If you would like our assistance switching to Backblaze or any other cloud backup service, or if you’d like to discuss options, please give us a call. If you would like to stay with CrashPlan, we suggest keeping an eye out for an email from them which will include expiration dates and pricing.