CrashPlan shutting down Home consumer backup service

CrashPlan CEO Joe Payne announced today plans to shut down the company's consumer backup service CrashPlan for Home entirely.

According to the announcement, CrashPlan for Home subscriptions are not offered anymore already, and renewals have been disabled as well.

Existing customer subscriptions are honored by the company, and an additional 60 days of service is added to each existing subscription to give customers ample time to migrate to another backup service.

Starting October 23, 2018, CrashPlan for Home will no longer be available.

Code42, the company behind CrashPlan, provides the following explanation for exiting the consumer market:

Code42 is committed to delivering the best services and technologies to our customers. Over the past few years, we’ve seen data protection needs of consumers and businesses – both small businesses and enterprises – diverge. To best meet these needs and continue delivering the best possible products and services, we have decided to focus our business strategy on enterprise and small business customers.

The company suggests that existing customers check out the company's CrashPlan for Small Businesses subscription, or switch to Carbonite.

Customers who switch to CrashPlan for Small Business get the upgrade for the remainder of the subscription for free, and then 75% off for the next 12 months afterwards.

This is the easiest option from a migration point of view as customers may migrate their cloud backups of 5 TB or smaller and all local backups to CrashPlan for Small Business. The regular price of the plan is $10 per month.

Carbonite plans start at $59.99 per year, but CrashPlan customers are eligible for a discount if they provide Carbonite with their CrashPlan email address. This discount appears to be a 50% discount on Carbonite Core only.

Note that CrashPlan for Small Business does not support computer to computer backups.

While Code42 selected Carbonite as the exclusive referral partner for existing Home customers, other services may be better suited depending on a customer's needs.

Backblaze for instance published a blog post in which it compared its own backup service to that of Carbonite. While it may not be cheaper compared to the Basic account of Carbonite if you figure in the discount that CrashPlan users get, it provides features such as two-factor authentication, restoration by mail, backing up of external hard drives, or backing up files of any size which Carbonite does not offer or only in limited fashion.

Tip: Check out our overview of free drive backup programs for Windows.

Now You: Do you use a local or online backup solution?

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