This sounds like a decent compromise for some with over 5TB.
However, I'm not sure this is anyone's fault but Crashplan's. They advertised Unlimited storage. If that wasn't cost effective for them, then honestly they should have changed their polices.
In the end they probably should have just come out and say they can't sustain their business at the $5/mo level.
Well, they
have changed their policies, haven't they? Anyone can sign up for a small business account that is effectively double the cost of their (apparently unsustainable) home plans. We can certainly quibble as to how they chose to communicate this, but effectively they've done exactly what you suggest.
That's pretty low and petty of you to blame "users like me" for actually using a product as it was sold to me in it's fullest. It's not like I found a "loophole" or found a bug in their software that I am "taking advantage of". In this case, UNLIMITED means UNLIMITED...NO LIMITS, NO CONSTRAINTS. Blame their business decision makers on this, not those that actually use a product as advertised. At any rate, you're missing the point...they are a BACKUP company....as in DATA PRESERVATION...if you opt to stay with them (due to plan changes, upgrades, etc...), a customer should NEVER loose data....They have failed in their only purpose on life, and not only advertising that they are going to fail the customer, they will bold face tell you to your face that they don't care.
THAT attitude alone should make any potential customer (person, family, or business) think twice before using them as a backup service.
I wasn't trying to be insulting; apologies if it came across that way. The business reality when providing an 'all-you-can-eat' plan is that there are inevitably going to be some very heavy users and some light users. The company hopes that on average, they can make money when all the costs are averaged out. Apparently, the math was no longer working in Code 42's favor.
In this case, I suspect that the average amount of data being uploaded was increasing faster than the cost of storing that data was decreasing. That is not sustainable. When you consider that the most common subscribers are probably laptop users with 100 Gigs (if that) of data, it's going to be difficult to make money if you have more than a handful of users with 50 or 100 times as much data.
As for the 5TB cap in migrating to the small business plan, I can understand your concerns and the issue it causes you. However, you should keep in mind that even at 5TB, the company is almost certainly losing money, even at the higher price of $10/month. They probably expect to lose many customers with >5TB of data, and that's just fine with them.
Fortunately, they are giving a reasonable amount of notice (remaining contract term + 2 months) to make alternative arrangements, and people who choose to migrate to the small business plans are reporting a very smooth process.
It could be much, much worse - a few years ago, an enterprise cloud storage company hosting many, many Petabytes of storage ran out of money and shut down. They provided their customers (medium to large enterprises who don't even buy toilet paper for their bathrooms without a multi-month competitive bid process) with just five days' notice before they stopped accepting newly replicated data. Customers then had
less than a month to find an alternate host and offload any data that they didn't want to lose forever.
That was a cluster**** of epic proportions. In contrast, the Code 42 / CrashPlan migration plan is very customer friendly.
