This whole CrashPlan Home episode deepens my skepticism about services that claim to offer an unlimited amount of a physical resource (atoms on a hard drive, in this case) for a fixed price. Code42 has mentioned certain reasons for exiting the home user market, but I wonder if an unmentioned reason is the cost of providing service to an excessive number of users who consume more hard drive space than is profitable. As a current Crash Plan Home customer, I might be one of those users, given my 2.2 TB data set. It's felt like a steal for me, but in the future, I'll likely seek an option where I can get a good deal, a good, fair price instead of a steal (which in the end results in pain and hassle and ends up costing more than what I bargained for).
Is the cost of disk space the reason why BackBlaze expunges files deleted on a backed-up computer from the backup on your servers after 30 days? Though I think you guys are cool, this policy is a deal breaker for me, as far as a Crash Plan Home alternative is concerned. At this point, I'd rather pay a reasonable price for the disk space I use rather than have an "unlimited" plan where I have to constantly look over my shoulder at my files, to make sure important files haven't been inadvertently deleted within the past month. If the cost is too much for me, I'd rather be the one that makes the decision as to which files to exclude from my online backup, rather than have the backup service do it for me.
P.S. and Disclaimer: I developed a backup companion utility (Bitrot Detector) that happens to be more relevant and useful to users of a service like Backblaze which performs file mirroring than one like CrashPlan Home which performs file versioning. However, I'd prefer it if every backup service did versioning rather than mirroring, as version-preservation is what allows you to set-and-forget a backup, rather than to set-and-constantly-worry. Though of course I want more customers for my product, I'd rather have relatively fewer if it meant I lived in a world where every backup service did versioning and fewer people experienced data loss and the resulting grief.