Last August saw news come out about CrashPlan exiting the consumer market. This cloud based backup provider has decided to focus their resources on other sections of their enterprise. This has led to some unhappy customers, who now have until October 22, 2018 to find a new backup solution.
CrashPlan isn’t the first cloud backup company to go make some radical changes. In 2011, Mozy dropped its popular $5/month unlimited cloud backup plan and replaced it with a $6/month 50GB plan. Non-backup services have also struggled, like Bitcasa. They launched in 2011 with an unlimited cloud storage offering for $10/month or $100/year. Two years later it was raised to $1,000/year, and the following year Bitcasa dropped the unlimited plan entirely. In 2015, Microsoft dropped its unlimited “OneDrive” storage plan. Why do companies like these make the switch from promising the moon, to blowing up the moon?
As with most of life’s questions, the answer is money. Companies find that while most users of their services don’t use much storage, there are always some users that use tens of terabytes or more. This makes the financial aspect of these types of services unsustainable. CrashPlan insisted back in August that its decision was motivated by a desire to better serve business users. That’s a difficult statement to make with so many of their loyal customers feeling left to blow out in the wind.
Cloud backups are necessary protection against fire, floods, theft, and any other disasters that can spring up at a moment’s notice. Think of all of this as “data insurance”. Businesses aren’t the only ones who need a safety net and less headaches. So do you. Those who leave CrashPlan will need to find something as good…scratch that…something better well before the time October 2018 comes around.
Make sure your backup provider can save you from costly downtime if you suffer data loss. No matter what happens to your data, you should be able to recover it all in just a few clicks. You don’t need to break the bank to have the best cloud backup. For a reasonable price you can have control right at your fingertips, to an unlimited amount of computers, all while being maintenance-free. CrashPlan customers have their Plan B with Nordic Backup.
