CrashPlan has been and always will be your friend.
If you haven’t watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or Star Trek into Darkness, some of this blog post may not resonate with you, including that heading. Please bear with me though. There’s reasoning behind the analogy I am going to use in explaining CrashPlan’s brand history, our relationship with you and our other customers, and where we are all going next.
To quickly catch non-trekkies up, in both of those movies Spock and Captain Kirk are having a very poignant moment. After decades of working together – saving and sometimes getting frustrated with one another, one of them thinks he might die and makes it clear that through it all they have been friends. In Wrath of Khan, it is Spock who thinks he might die. In Into Darkness, it’s Kirk. (SPOILER ALERT: in both cases, they end up alive and go on for more adventures together). Just as important, their friendship lives through many more adventures together
CrashPlan has been your friend even through some hard times.
Kirk and Spock had their low moments. Friends always do. Often it is outside circumstances or characters that brought those things to bear. In their case in the first of the recent movies, they fight over who is or should be in charge. That’s never been our problem. CrashPlan is clear. You are in charge.
Still, we haven’t made it easy to be our friend. For example, we have changed our identity/logo a lot. Remember when our site looked like this?
And, then at one point several years ago, we changed focus a bit – focusing more on our business-centric packages. That’s natural when you are exploring markets (or space). In Star Trek, the United Federation of Planets has had changing priorities, but the Enterprise always stayed true to its mission to explore strange new worlds. CrashPlan’s mission to explore new ways to be the best endpoint backup and recovery solution has never changed. Our friendship with some of you experienced a rough spot when we dropped our Consumer package, but hundreds of thousands of you stayed with us on our Enterprise and Small Business editions (even though some of you are still using it for personal use) because as many of you have told me “CrashPlan just works.”
Last year, we became a standalone company, but much like Spock in the Star Trek: The Search for Spock, we didn’t really change all that much. Kirk just had to be patient with his friend for a bit so their friendship could persist. It’s the same for you and us. We’re still the same science-obsessed friend you’ve come to know and like, and we appreciate our long-time friendship with you and all our customers.
Why do I think CrashPlan is your friend?
As an aside, you may be wondering why I chose an analogy of friendship to discuss your relationship with the CrashPlan brand. In my more than twenty years of marketing technology, I have not seen a brand quite like CrashPlan. The folks who work here aren’t passionate about technology for technology’s sake. Nor just for profit. Instead they are passionate about people including you – taking care of your ideas and your work. That passion shows in our commitment. Heck, our most tenured teammate working on CrashPlan has done so for more than twenty years…that’s commitment.
What CrashPlan does and what it means to you shows through. In my 11 months here so far, again and again one or another of you (personal users, IT admins, and cyber pros) tells me how much you love CrashPlan because “it just works,” or how much you miss the old consumer version and how mad you were when it was taken away. Or, how you can’t wait for when we will release a new personal version again – oh, that’s happening now! What are those feelings if not the sentiments of friends?
What adventures in the universe of backup and recovery are you and CrashPlan going on next?
You may have noticed in social media and the news that we launched some new packages today to complement our existing packages:
- CrashPlan Essential is perfect for individuals that need to protect critical personal digital files, including tax returns, photos, budget spreadsheets, music, and more. For just $2.99 a month, users can protect up to 200GB of data with automatic cloud backups, state-of-the-art encryption, unlimited versioning and user-friendly file restore workflows — with the flexibility to add storage for $1 for every 100GB as needs grow.
- CrashPlan Professional is designed for businesses or individual users who have large data storage needs. Users get the same trusted backup functionality — with unlimited cloud storage capacity and file versioning for just $8 a month (less for yearly plans). The solution supports multiple users and adds specific administrative features optimized for small-to-medium businesses including secure service access (SSA).
- CrashPlan Enterprise isn’t new. It’s the same robust solution for small- to large-sized enterprises. It has all administrative functionality to meet the scale and complexity of enterprise organizations and is trusted by some of the biggest names in every sector as the foundation of a modern business resiliency program. And now, it is available to purchase through the website as well as our sales team and partners.
- CrashPlan for MSPs was released earlier this year to better serve managed service providers and their small to mid-sized enterprise customers will be available for purchase online soon.
Those new packages are only the beginning of our new adventure together. We are working on our roadmap for 2024 and have a lot of new things coming to help you stay at the leading edge of data resilience. We will continue to be the leader in endpoint backup, AND we will be expanding our features and portfolio to bring new value to our customers. Read more about our product vision here and our product development here.
Follow us on X (formerly known as Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to stay abreast of what’s coming!
Please keep reaching out and letting us know how we can provide value in this relationship. Let’s live long and prosper together.
Oh, and if you were wondering why I chose a Star Trek analogy. That’s easy. I am a HUGE geek like a lot of us here at CrashPlan. Don’t even get me started on how Darth Vader didn’t realize that R2 was a data exfiltration unit when he was the one who built him or how at least four of the Star Wars movie plots rely on data backup and recovery as a major plot device. Think about it.
The rebellion are actually ethical hackers who have exfiltrated data from unencrypted backups from the empire at least twice. And, R2’s backup of the map to Luke and C3PO’s memory both saved the day in the latest series! But, that’s a different story in a galaxy far, far away….
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