Copy Cloud Storage service’s life ends on May 1, 2016

Barracuda Networks announced plans yesterday to retire its cloud storage services Copy and CudaDrive on May 1, 2016.

The company launched the cloud storage service in 2013, in a period when many company launched or improved their online storage offerings.

Copy had a lot going for it. It was backed by Barracuda Networks, an established company in the storage and technology field, offered clients for all major desktop and mobile systems, and an interesting option to share files directly with other users of the service.

Copy users got 5 Gigabyte of storage initially but could use the built-in referral system to increase the amount of storage by 5 Gigabyte for every user referred to the service.

Copy Discontinuation

The announcement of the retirement of Copy and CudaDrive comes in form of a blog post on the official Barracuda blog.

According to Rod Mathews, VP & GM Storage Business, Barracuda made the decision to concentrate its efforts on its "most strategic initiatives" instead.

We are constantly evaluating our product portfolio in the context of our overall strategic goals. With that in mind, we have begun a process to focus our resources on our most strategic initiatives and to drive more innovation and faster growth within those products.

As such, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue our Copy and CudaDrive services.

Update: The Copy website loads the information as well now if you open it.

A page on the company's Techlib site reveals additional information about the decision. Both services will be discontinued on May 1, 2016 meaning that users of the service have until then to back up their data from the services for safekeeping as all data will be deleted automatically on the servers on that day.

A step by step guide for moving content has been created which provides instructions on creating local copies of data stored on Copy servers, and instructions on moving data to other cloud storage providers using Mover.

Mover is a third-party service that has been designed to move files between cloud storage providers.

Customers who paid for the service may receive a (partial) refund if they have paid for it annually.

Closing Words

Copy may not have been as popular as Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive, but its global rank on Alexa showed that it was a top 7000 site of the world.

Still, there is lots of competition in the file synchronization and online hosting niche, and having to go up against heavyweight companies like Microsoft, Google or Amazon is without the shadow of a doubt difficult especially since storage space pricing dropped in recent time.

Now You: Are you affected by the closing of Copy?