CrashPlan is Ditching Consumers: Time to Move Your Photo Backups

If you use the popular CrashPlan for Home as your cloud photo backup service, here’s some bad news: you’re going to have to start paying more or move your photo archive elsewhere. Code42 just announced that CrashPlan for Home is being discontinued.

Code42 says it’s transitioning out of the consumer backup market and shifting its strategic focus to serve business and education customers. Starting now, CrashPlan for Home is no longer being offered to new customers. The entire service is also being wound down over the coming months until it’s completely killed off on October 23rd, 2018.

If you’re an existing customer, here’s what this change means for you: Code42 is giving you a free additional 60 days to your current subscription and two different options.

The first option is to upgrade to the CrashPlan for Small Business service, which costs $10 per device per month for unlimited storage. You’ll also get a 75% discount for your first year.

The second route you can take is to stop using CrashPlan and to move all your data elsewhere. CrashPlan now has an exclusive partnership with the competing cloud storage service Carbonite, which will be offering discounted prices exclusively to existing CrashPlan customers who switch to its $60/year ($5/month) service.

If you’d like to move your data to a service other than Carbonite, you may want to wait until your current subscription with CrashPlan expires, as the money you’ve already paid is non-refundable.

It seems that after years of offering free and extremely cheap options for cloud data storage, companies in the industry are beginning to tighten their belts or die off. Copy.com shuttered its cloud storage service in May 2016. And earlier this year, Amazon killed off its $60/year unlimited storage plan that many photographers had been using for photo backups.

Cloud storage is a highly competitive industry in which we’re seeing survival of the fittest play out, so if you’d like to have an ultra-long-term solution for backing up your giant archive of photos, make your choice wisely.