R.I.P CrashPlan

I've been a huge proponent of CrashPlan. I started with the personal offsite backup.

That worked well and I eventually added their cloud backup.

You can read about my experiences here. I'll save you some time. It's nothing but good.

Then...

In August 2017 I got the following e-mail:

Thank you for being a CrashPlan® for Home customer. We're honored that you’ve trusted us to protect your data.
It's because of this trust that we want you to know that we have shifted our business strategy to focus on the enterprise and small business segments. This means that over the next 14 months we will be exiting the consumer market and you must choose another option for data backup before your subscription expires. We are committed to providing you with an easy and efficient transition.

They partnered with Carbonite but Carbonite's offering just isn't what CrashPlan's was. For example Carbonite only keeps deleted files 30 days.

Then during the Black Friday sales I saw an offer from StackSocial for 2TB for life for $39.99. (That has since gone back up to $49.99.)

I had to look at that.

What StackSocial was offering was Zoolz Archive Home. What comprised the 2TB was 1TB of Instant Vault storage and 1TB of Cold Storage.

Instant Vault has to be accessed using a web interface. You can also generate shared links for the Instant Vault storage like DropBox.

Cold Storage has a Windows Service that manages the backups like CrashPlan. Cold Storage uses Amazon Glacier as a store. This means that it takes approximately 3-5 hour to restore from Cold Storage. I don't see that as a problem for backup.

My CrashPlan backup was about 400GB so it's going to take a while to backup all that to Zoolz but it's chugging along just fine.

As a backstop I've signed up for CrashPlan for Small Business at 75% discount for a year.