Crashplan for Home Users--the end

[Cantab]

I (and presumably 1,000's of others) have received an email saying that Crashplan wil be ending its service for home users. One of the options is to switch to Carbonite.

I checked the Crashplan website: the email is for real, not spam. And after years of delay, I finally signed up with Crashplan a month or so ago!

[Donald]

Bruce - Could you please explain what this is about and what the link is to photography. Who or what is Crashplan?

[Cantab]

Donald, Crashplan is an online backup programme. It can be configured to do several things, including automatic backing up of photos to the "cloud" or to an external hard drive.

[Donald]

Okay. Thank you.

[rpcrowe]

I can recommend Carbonite... It seems like a great backup. It was there when I needed to back up my images...

[Cantab]

I can recommend Carbonite... It seems like a great backup. It was there when I needed to back up my images...

Before signing up with Crashplan, I'd read positive comments here on CiC about both Crashplan and Carbonite, and basically flipped a coin: Crashplan won.

Carbonite have a special price for folk transferring from Crashplan so that's where I'll be going in due course.

[Mike Buckley]

I didn't realize you have such impeccable timing, Bruce.

[davidedric]

I've had the email too, and just started looking. The email from CrashPlan suggests two alternatives: migrate to CrashPlan Small Business, or Carbonite, but the offerings seems different. Ignoring first year discounts and special offers,:

CrashPlan cost is $10 per month, so $120 per year. It seems to offer pretty much what you had before, except backup to or from another computer. It also supports backup to an external drive. Everything (storage, versions, retention of deleted files) seems comprehensive.

Carbonate Basic is $60 per year. That does not include backing up an external drive (for me essential) , if added leads to $99 per year. Storage and retention are more limited, but you'd need to go to their web site to see if that would affect you.

Of course, moving to Carbonite would mean backing up again. In my case 500Gb of data which would be pretty tedious at 2mbs. Plus of course I would otherwise be able to recover deleted and versions of files stored in CrashPlan.

I have a few months to decide, but at the moment I'm inclined to stay with CrashPlan

Dave

[DanK]

I originally chose Crashplan over Carbonite for the offsite backup of my photos primarily because the initial backup (which takes a LONG time) was slower with Carbonite. Otherwise, they seemed similar for my purposes. (I don't back up an external drive.) My Crashplan account won't expire until February, but I already "registered" to be reminded at that time to switch to Carbonite.

Backing up from scratch will take a lot of time, but it doesn't require much effort. You just start it, and then let the computer run for however long it takes, which I vaguely recall should be about 2 weeks with the relatively slow speed I have at that location in my house. I just turn the monitor off to save power.