Ah, I understand: my grammar was unclear. I just saw the first page, where it said "free," and I was confused about what the economics of the plan were. I don't care if it is free, and in fact that free factor was a concern, since I was wondering how it stayed in business. Clicking through and seeing the pricing, I understand now.
The question was more "how does it stay in business," not, "in what way is it free."
: )
I didn't realize that you were the original poster, sorry.
I admit their product offering is a bit confusing. It does make sense though:
You can install CrashPlan (the regular, free version) on any number of computers and set them up to back to each other/external drives/ftp/etc. This works wonders for family computers, for example. At this point its all free.
If thats not enough for you you can buy the "Plus" version of the software that offers continuous backup, stronger encryption, etc. This is where it stops being free; you're down something like $60 for the software.
Regardless of which version of the software you use, however, you can pay for CrashPlan Central, which is effectively another backup destination that happens to be on their servers, this is the "online" portion of their offering. The cost is more or less on part with the Mozys out there.
So technically if you are OK with backing up just between your existing machines and you don't need up to the minute backups, their free offering will work just fine for you and it works well.
