Yet another major player in remote data storage is leaving the ‘game’ and their users have to adapt around that decision. To be more specific the company is CrashPlan (Code42) and in particular their CrashPlan For Home service which is being discontinued.
“Effective August 22, 2017, Code42 will no longer offer new – or renew – CrashPlan for Home subscriptions, and we will begin to sunset the product over several months.
CrashPlan for Home will no longer be available for use starting October 23, 2018.”
Code42 has issued a statement through text and video that lays out what’s happening, and what to expect. Effectively, Code42 is transitioning out of the consumer market to “focus all of our efforts on the business and organization market,” according to the CEO. This means that over the next 18 months they will exit the consumer market, though that number is a bit misleading.
All consumer contracts in good standing will be honored, and to allow time for transition an extra 60 days worth of ‘free’ service will be provided while alternate arrangements can be made.
What are those arrangements? Well, there are a few. You can, probably for the most seamless transition, shift to a Crashplan for Small Business plan which offers unlimited back-up for $10 a month per device. Alternatively Code42 has partnered with Carbonite to offer discounted prices to existing CrashPlan Home Service users choosing the route of the $60/year plan. Of course you have the option to leave CrashPlan, skip Carbonite, and go somewhere else altogether.
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It piques one’s interest to see how many transition to their Small Business plan because a company that shifts this way doesn’t exactly instill a lot of confidence in how they will move in the future, but this is the nature of the game when it comes to cloud storage, and one of the reasons why we advocate having physical off-site storage of your own for your important files. Frankly, the situation is not new as many will recall Amazon’s most recent hiccup of the same nature, and we can probably expect this kind of pinball migration from service to service to continue.
Source: CrashPlan
