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[OT] CrashPlan Abandoning Home Users   [OT]

By: Art Kocsis     So Calif  
Date: Aug 31,2017 at 23:41
In Response to: [OT] CrashPlan Abandoning Home Users (Peter Shute)

To prevent loss, it is good practice to compose these posts in a separate editor and then pate them into the ZTree Forum message box. However... YOU HAVE TO REMEMBER TO POST THEM, DUMMY!!! Duh!!! This was supposed to have been posted nine days ago!

> > CrashPlan just announced that effective today, Aug 22, 2017, they
> > are abandoning Home Users. While they will honor current contracts
> > until expiration, no new contracts or contract extensions will be
> > offered. https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/consumer/nextsteps/
> >
> What was the difference between home and business plans? Cost? I assume
> they're happy to let home users switch to a business plan? How much more
> expensive?
>
> I wonder what they'll do to ensure no one is relying on a backup that
> n longer exists.

The links I posted should answer most of your questions.

IIRC, Carbonite was offering a $75/year promo (a 25% discount), to CrashPlan customers. Of course, when the promo expires the cost will then go up. However, I don't really know if the two plans are comparable or if CrashPlan would transfer the files. [Actually, BackBlaze posted a comparison of their services:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/crashplan-alternative-backup-solution/
and https://www.backblaze.com/
See also: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/arti...13-Top-Questions-from-CrashPlan-Users

What I gathered from my cursory read was CrashPlan would switch home customers over to a business plan and send out a few reminders before deleting all the data but that was about it. I don't think CrashPlan has an option to send out physical media with customer data.

I suspect that more than a few people will someday have a rude awakening when they find that their "safe, offsite" data no longer exists. If they are not actively monitoring CrashPlan and don't get the message (such as if they didn't tell CrashPlan their email address changed), they are going to be SOOL.

Relying on a web company to protect the family jewels can be problematic but to rely on one that has not been profitable for 5-10 years is begging for trouble. It takes a lot more than cheap big disks to successfully run a backup service.

I don't use BackBlaze yet but it is looking better and better. They have been in business and profitable for ten years and seem to know what they are doing. Their unlimited storage price has stayed at $5/mon from the beginning - even in the aftermath of the Thailand flood when disk prices went sky high. They just opened a second data center in Phoenix as their Sacramento service center is nearing its 500 petabyte capacity. (500,000 Terabytes is one SL of data!) They use custom software to monitor their disk drives and to pull them when disks start failing. IIRC, they can handle two simultaneous disk failures without data loss.

In addition to the unlimited service (which includes physical flash and hard drive restoration media), they now offer a "B2" cloud service which supports integration with a large number of backup software/hardware devices as well as an API and a command line interface. The CLI looks especially interesting as it would work quite well with the ZTree's F9 Menu. At $60/year per terabyte the B2 service is inexpensive (The first 10 gigabytes are free so one can easily try it out.) My problem is how to manage it. I have over 10 TB of data in over a million files with a lot of redundancy. (See why I love ZTree! Try navigating that with Explorer!) It is going to take a lot of work to reorganize everything for cloud backups.

Hmm, I wonder if the CrashPlan local software could be adapted to use the BackBlaze B2 service as a backup node?


Namaste', Art

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