How to move from CrashPlan for Home to another backup solution

If you’ve read any articles about Macbased local and cloud backup software and services by me or any other longtime tech writers, you’ll know that, first, we largely recommended Code42’s CrashPlan for Home and, second, we have long also had concerns about it. That turned out to be reasonable, given that Code42 has announced the end of its Home product. Now it’s time to pursue a CrashPlan alternative, and this article will help get you started.

First off, why did we like CrashPlan for Home so much? It was comprehensive, letting you back up nearly anything to anything: from a computer to external drives; from one computer to another you controlled for networked or remote backup; from one computer to a peer, a computer run by a friend or colleague, with full encryption so that person didn’t need to worry about protecting your files; and to CrashPlan’s central cloud servers. It also had two strong options for user-controlled encryption.

But that was balanced with how ugly, awkward, and slow the Java-based client software was. Yes, Java! Code42 had promised a native Mac client starting years ago, which it delivered—only to enterprise users. Over the last few years, it got rid of multiyear, highly discounted subscriptions, and a method of seeding a backup by sending a hard drive and