Comments on: Carbonite Backup: A Review of Carbonite

By: TravisVS

TravisVS — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:02:48 +0000

David:

Thanks for stopping by and leaving your comments about Carbonite. You are correct – you cannot backup a mapped drive or an external hard drive with Carbonite. I’m hoping they change the sometime soon as I backup to an external drive myself on a weekly basis.

TravisVS
Site Admin

By: David X Messer

David X Messer — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:38:11 +0000

I was recommended Carbonite by a friend of mine and after an evening setting up the free trial on my Mac I was quite happy with it until I discovered a flaw, and it’s not one that is obvious from looking at the website.

Your files need to be on your boot drive. If you keep your files on an external drive or a network drive Carbonite won’t let you select these drives for backing up.

I keep all of my photos, music and other important files on a NAS device which is mapped as a network drive on my Mac. I notice that Mozy doesn’t seem to have this limitation?

By: TravisVS

TravisVS — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:32:13 +0000

John:

Thanks for the details. Sorry to hear your experience with Carbonite’s backup wasn’t the greatest. I haven’t had to do an entire restore myself (knock on wood). I’ve only restored the occasional file or two. Your dilemma is exactly why I recommend EVERYONE backup their files locally to an external hard drive at least once a month – preferably once per week. Use Carbonite as strictly an insurance policy – an absolute worse case scenario. I never plan on relying on Carbonite’s restore process to be honest. I have over 150gb of data backed up right now. I couldn’t imagine how long that would take to restore! I will only resort to it if my external backup doesn’t work after my computer crashes.

TravisVS
Site Admin

By: John

John — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:14:37 +0000

have been a carbonite customer for 12 months and have had to perform two restores using this product due to Dell hardware problems and recent virus issue requiring o/s rebuild including disk format. I have no problem with the backup side of this product but the restore and support is poor at best. The files eventually get restored after several days but you have to watch the process like a hawk. Their restore status is not accurate and they recommend reading their lengthy log files. The process hangs “waiting for connection to carbonite backup server”. This requires carbonite to log on to your computer and reset their processes. In some cases they have to reinstall the software. THey do not handle Outlook file restores very well, a 500MB files took 24 hours on a DSL line and they were not saturating it. Support wait times were 10-15 minutes during the day and some of the support staff were rude, demanding that we restore the software each time and when you ask for a supervisor they magically fix the process. We are now looking at Mozy along with a local backup option for Outlook. Make sure you take the time to test not only the backup but the restore!

By: john Chase

john Chase — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:46:26 +0000

Carbonite looks good but failed when I really needed it.

I was not able to restore my files after a computer rebuild and got no response to my query

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:57:43 +0000

Yeah that makes sense , I will just let Carbonite do it’s thing just in case something goes wrong it will be nice to know that I can still get my stuff back even if it takes a while. I will also do what you said and back up my stuff on my external hard drive weekly. I just was not sure if it was taking so long because I was doing it wrong, I get it now. Thanks TravisVS for getting back to me so soon.

Take care
Jeff

By: TravisVS

TravisVS — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 03:46:33 +0000

Jeff:

It can take a long time to restore your files. That’s one of the drawbacks to any online backup service – it can take days to get your files restored, especially if you have a lot of files. I have never done a complete restore because I use Carbonite strictly as an insurance policy. In other words, I would only restore the files from it in the event I lost everything locally. I do weekly backups to my external hard drive. That way if I ever need a file (or all of my files), I can get to them instantly. Carbonite is just there in the event my computer crashes and my external hard drive crashes, gets destroyed, or gets stolen;)

I personally don’t advise people to rely 100% on any online backup service. I recommend weekly backups to an external hard drive and use these online services as more of a catastrophic backup. Restoring a file here and there from online backup services is usually pretty quick, but to do a full file restore can take a long time. I have over 150 GB of data backed up at Carbonite. I couldn’t imagine how many days it would take to restore!! It’s just nice to know my stuff is there “in case.”

TravisVS
Site Admin

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:33:45 +0000

Was trying to restore all my files to a reformatted hard drive and it was on 10 percent for four days before it went to 11 percent restored. Is it normal to take so long to get everything back? I gave up after a week and a half of it barely doing anything I ended up just using my external hard drive that I also back things up on. (This is a home computer).

By: JT

JT — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:02:51 +0000

Crummy service…don’t use it. Their servers are bogged down, couldn’t even access remotely….

By: TravisVS

TravisVS — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:28:34 +0000

Aaron:

Sorry to hear about your experience with Carbonite online backup. If you read this, it would be great if you left more details. I’ve never heard of this problem before. It shouldn’t just stop working. And what do you mean exactly when you say it stopped working?

TravisVS
Site Admin