CrashPlan is discontinuing their Home product: Thoughts on Backblaze vs Livedrive in anticipation of the residential rush?
Crashplan Discontinuing Home
- Thread starter ATechG
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ccritchie
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"Put the customer first", unless you are a home customer.
"Going forward, we will exclusively serve all businesses large and small, as well as education organizations. Code42’s success has been driven by our growth in this segment with 50% year-over-year recurring revenue for the last three years."
...and there is the reason, kids. That's where their priorities lie. Although they are trying to steer customers toward Carbonite, that company has shifted their focus toward business backup as well. It makes me wonder how long Carbonite will continue to support them.
Of course, if you like your Crashplan, you can keep your Crashplan. It's just that the price per year will more than double, kind of like your healthcare premiums.
Galdorf
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Just checked my email looks like they don't care about home customers now to find an alternative some of my customers use it for backups after recommending it to them.
What a scummy thing to do i can see all they care about is $$$.
What a scummy thing to do i can see all they care about is $$$.
Galdorf
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Blackblaze did not get very good reviews its an all or nothing backup lol : https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395755,00.asp
dgoglio
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Based on their pricing for the home plans I am not surprised. I always wondered how they could make it profitable at that price. Seems like they give you a decent deal to move over to the Pro. You can migrate and finish your current term on Pro and then get 75% off for your first full year after that initial term. You can also move over to Carbonite which from what I have seen with them they are moving towards small and medium sized businesses as well. I guess no one can make a profit in the consumer market.
GTP
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Have a look at JottaCloud. Unlimited devices, unlimited storage. Has a few really nice features as well.
thecomputerguy
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I was inundated with emails this morning from clients who got Crashplan's discontinuation email. I used and recommended crashplan for years and I really liked it for a few reasons:
1.) Cheap, Unlimited cloud storage
2.) Easy, Friendly UI
3.) Ability to also backup to local storage
4.) Excellent reporting
I really liked the ability to backup to local storage so the client could have cloud backup and a secondary backup to their onsite local external backup. This also allowed me the ability to sell the client an external with the explanation that if they ever had to do a massive restore, like in the event of a HD failure it would be a lot quicker to restore from a local backup as opposed to the cloud backup.
Crashplan also sends weekly email reports telling the client what the status of the backup is. Anytime a client got a warning, or a weird looking report they would forward it to me, I'd find out why crashplan wasn't working fix it, and charge them. I looked into their Crashplan for Business option and I was positively underwhelmed with what the significantly more expensive product offered. Basically all it added was a cloud based admin console for your backups, otherwise it was exactly the same product. I did use the CP for business on some of my servers as just a simple file backup, but this year something happened to the product. I could not for the life of me keep the application, or the tray (which does the reporting) alive on ANY server. The tray app would crash, I'd get constant errors from all of my servers. Servers ranged from 2008R2 to 2012R2 with a huge variety of hardware. I never did figure out why Crashplan kept crashing on me so I decided to move elsewhere.
Currently I've moved a lot of my business backups to Cloudberry + B2. Cloudberry offers imaged based backup as well which is nice (but I haven't tested it).
For my small-time single residential computers, or single business computer I'm considering moving them to Backblaze. For the simple cheapo's I can just install Backblaze using my affiliate link. For clients who want my eyes on their setup I can resell them Backblaze at a 100% - 200% markup simply just so I can login to my admin console and see if it's keeping up to date. If it isn't then I call them and bill them for repair, restores are also not included. I'd then reconfigure their externals I sold them for a Windows Image backup since Backblaze doesn't support local backup.
I don't want my small-time clients on Cloudberry + B2 because I don't want to chase them around every year for the Cloudberry license ($40) and I don't want to deal with the inconsistent storage habits of people. I don't want to find out that some client decided to drop 300GB of pictures into my backup and then be billed for it. Of course I can just overcharge ahead of time to avoid that or set limits on backup storage in the Cloudberry MSP panel but it just sounds like it could get messy.
1.) Cheap, Unlimited cloud storage
2.) Easy, Friendly UI
3.) Ability to also backup to local storage
4.) Excellent reporting
I really liked the ability to backup to local storage so the client could have cloud backup and a secondary backup to their onsite local external backup. This also allowed me the ability to sell the client an external with the explanation that if they ever had to do a massive restore, like in the event of a HD failure it would be a lot quicker to restore from a local backup as opposed to the cloud backup.
Crashplan also sends weekly email reports telling the client what the status of the backup is. Anytime a client got a warning, or a weird looking report they would forward it to me, I'd find out why crashplan wasn't working fix it, and charge them. I looked into their Crashplan for Business option and I was positively underwhelmed with what the significantly more expensive product offered. Basically all it added was a cloud based admin console for your backups, otherwise it was exactly the same product. I did use the CP for business on some of my servers as just a simple file backup, but this year something happened to the product. I could not for the life of me keep the application, or the tray (which does the reporting) alive on ANY server. The tray app would crash, I'd get constant errors from all of my servers. Servers ranged from 2008R2 to 2012R2 with a huge variety of hardware. I never did figure out why Crashplan kept crashing on me so I decided to move elsewhere.
Currently I've moved a lot of my business backups to Cloudberry + B2. Cloudberry offers imaged based backup as well which is nice (but I haven't tested it).
For my small-time single residential computers, or single business computer I'm considering moving them to Backblaze. For the simple cheapo's I can just install Backblaze using my affiliate link. For clients who want my eyes on their setup I can resell them Backblaze at a 100% - 200% markup simply just so I can login to my admin console and see if it's keeping up to date. If it isn't then I call them and bill them for repair, restores are also not included. I'd then reconfigure their externals I sold them for a Windows Image backup since Backblaze doesn't support local backup.
I don't want my small-time clients on Cloudberry + B2 because I don't want to chase them around every year for the Cloudberry license ($40) and I don't want to deal with the inconsistent storage habits of people. I don't want to find out that some client decided to drop 300GB of pictures into my backup and then be billed for it. Of course I can just overcharge ahead of time to avoid that or set limits on backup storage in the Cloudberry MSP panel but it just sounds like it could get messy.
Sky-Knight
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Home users are in a tough spot, they don't generally want to spend anything, yet due to a complete lack of access to technical resources consume the bulk of support dollars. The answer is quite simple, if you want to keep your backup, buy a business license. Sure, there are other products out there, but over time you'll see them all fold, due to the simple economic reality of the activity.
cyabro
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We've got a couple of clients who have a NAS with the CrashPlan app built in.
The problem is that only works as the Home version so not sure what we are going to do for them?!
Perhaps the person who wrote the app for the NAS will convert it to work with the Pro version.
The problem is that only works as the Home version so not sure what we are going to do for them?!
Perhaps the person who wrote the app for the NAS will convert it to work with the Pro version.
Your PCMD
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Obama? Is that really you?
Hence that is why its called a business. Though some businesses in our industry charge way more than the service they provide is worth. I could list several, but I will refrain.
cypress
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I tried it out awhile ago on my test laptop when you first suggested it and I got awful speeds. Just didn't work out for me.
In regards to other alternatives if they are residential I would offer them Backblaze becaue it is really easy to setup and even showing them how it works is good for the average consumer. I always recommend an external hard drive as well but we all know many clients say OK and then never do it. I've had a couple clients that never got cloud back up and finally had some disasters happen that really woke them up. One was a fire and another was a complete crash. After that they were much more receptive.
I really like Crashplan and it sucks that they are stopping residential but I wouldn't jump over to Carbonite because it is only a matter of time before they do the same thing anyways.
GTP
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That's a bummer! I guess results vary. I don't have any speed issues with it at all.
Your PCMD
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I just not even 2 weeks ago gained a new business client and they all had Carbonite. They have had several issues in the past and had to reload the OS. Told me horror stories of it taking them hours to get their backups. I switched the entire company to BackBlaze and also sold them a Synology 4-bay. Now all 33 new computers I built them spread over 9 locations are completely backed up and they are ecstatic on how easy it all is now. Its all automatic and even got them all on MSP. Makes me love my freaking job.
Don't most of these annual plans pretty much cost about what a 1-2 TB external hard drive would anyway?
Couldn't I just back up my important docs/photos/whatever on one of the 12 free cloud services. or, on my own hard drive?
Or image my entire drive on a hard drive I purchased for $40 in much less time?
I never could understand how the Crashplans of the business....stayed in business...
Couldn't I just back up my important docs/photos/whatever on one of the 12 free cloud services. or, on my own hard drive?
Or image my entire drive on a hard drive I purchased for $40 in much less time?
I never could understand how the Crashplans of the business....stayed in business...
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While I dont like it either, they are a business, not a charity.
They probably looked at their numbers and found out most of their income comes from businesses and businesses probably require less customer support.
Thats not a dumb move business-wise if their numbers worked out that way. We just dont have to stay with them as techs.
While it is an inconvenience for us, there is plenty of opportunity for us to make money migrating clients over to something else and/or re-evaluate clients existing backup solutions.
Or hell, even just getting in touch with our clients about this can generate new income: "Hey, you might have seen an email but Crashplan blah blah.... Hows everything over there? Anything I can help with?"
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fencepost
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For a huge percentage of people if you have to do something for a backup it doesn't happen. Similarly, a locally-attached hard drive or NAS where you're backing up to an accessible share is vulnerable to any ransomware infection you may get or that may make it onto the network.
I have to admit I didn't really help Crashplan much - for my personal stuff I'm using the free version which is why it has files from 4? past computers in it as well, and why some of the archives that those backup files are in drives that haven't been spun up in a couple of years. No per-machine $ cost for the free one was really nice, at the expense of it only backing up once every 24 hours - not really a huge issue for me.
Krilus
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AlexanderCS
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Speaking of which... now THIS is good marketing!
Galdorf
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No kidding it was hard to get home users to buy cloud storage with crashplan it was quite pricey they never changed prices going down always up does idrive do local backups as well?.Speaking of which... now THIS is good marketing!
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cypress
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Yeah that's crazy currently trying to get a business that has Carbonite and wants to get rid of them and push them on a Synology and also do a cloudback up. Currently awaiting their response on a quote. Those that do have Carobnite haven't really liked it anyways.
Speaking of which... now THIS is good marketing!
NICE! I use iDrive for a business and so far no issues. I had no idea about this offer. I may just jump on it. That price is incredible. I only have about 80GB of data anyway.
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