CrashPlan for Home

» see crashplan.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard of crashplan was after the shutdown notice in august 2017, when the ars technica and tedium kind of coverage picked it up. cloud backup as a paid consumer category never reached me in turkey, the same way mozy did not, for the same set of reasons. broadband upstream speed on a turkish residential adsl line in 2010 made the upload pitch difficult. crashplan for home belonged to the english-speaking power-user audience, the kind that had a homelab and a synology by 2013.

code42 was founded in minneapolis on 27 june 2001 by matthew dornquast, brian bispala, and mitch coopet. the company started on a different project that did not work out and pivoted to backup software around 2007. crashplan for home was the consumer-facing product. you installed a small agent on your windows or mac machine, picked the folders you wanted protected, and it ran in the background uploading encrypted blocks. the cloud-storage tier was the obvious sell. the peer-to-peer free tier was the cult sell.

on 22 august 2017 code42 announced that the home product would end. existing subscribers got their full remaining subscription plus an extra 60 days. the final cutoff was 22 october 2018, when the consumer service stopped accepting connections. the company shifted focus entirely to its enterprise tier and to a new insider-threat product line.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the technical pitch was good. encrypted client-side, deduplicated blocks, an agent that handled large libraries without choking. the cloud tier had unlimited storage at a flat fee. the mac client was a real client, not a port that lagged the windows one by a year, which made it a favorite in the small-shop mac world.

the free tier was the actual moment. you could point crashplan at a friend's machine across the internet, send your encrypted blocks to a spare drive on their pc, and back up off-site without ever giving code42 any money. the friend's machine did the same to yours. this is the kind of feature a startup ships when it is trying to win mindshare and an established vendor never ships because it does not generate revenue.

~ the day it died ~

on the cutoff date the agents stopped checking in. the restore window had been open all year for users to pull their data out of the cloud tier or migrate to carbonite (which had a partner discount) or to backblaze (the obvious competitor that had been undercutting crashplan on price since 2010). subscribers who waited too long lost the cloud copies of their backups. local destinations and the peer-to-peer destinations on user-owned hardware kept working, but the matching service that brokered the connections went dark.

~ what survived ~

the small-business product called crashplan for small business kept running and is the entity mill point capital bought in 2022. that thing is still alive at crashplan.com as of 2026, run as a separate company. the home product is gone for good. a github project called planc came out after the shutdown that lets people open and restore their old local crashplan archives without needing code42's server, which is how a real chunk of users actually got their last backups back. the peer-to-peer-to-a-friend feature has not come back in any mainstream backup product since.

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