Carbonite

[eddy-4]

Happy New Year! One of my goals for this year is to improve the way I do back ups of my photos. Currently, I have an external hard drive and I also make a DVD back up and keep them in separate locations. However, I'm thinking about Carbonite . . . reviews on them seem good and you can't beat the price. Any thoughts?

 

[Gdad]

I just signed up for the 15 day trial- the initial backup is going painfully slow and only at about 10% of 600GB after almost a week. It does seem to operate in the background fairly well so you don't really notice it. I think if you use offer code 100 when you sign up you get two free months.

 

[Gdad]

One thing I was disappointed in was it only backs up your c-drive- not external drives which is where my pictures are. I moved all my family pictures to my internal drive but am still looking for a better way to back up my 2x 1TB external drives.

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

I too have heard good things about Carbonite, but I just can't make the cloud plunge. Just don't trust it or any of the others, like someday they will go out of bankruptcy.

My system is 2 external hard drives and DVDs.

One hard drive sits at home, not plugged in until needed. The other one sits in my safety deposit box. First Saturday of the month I exchange the two drives. So at worse I could potentially lose a month's worth of data if the house implodes.

The DVD backups sit in a different part of the house.

In fact, I'll be watching the sales papers over the next couple of weeks. One of my external drives is now approaching 3 years old....about time to get a new drive into the mix just in case.

 

[AmandaRG]

We have been using Carbonite for quite some time and I love it. We had external drives, and they walked away when someone decided to enter my house uninvited! We do have a set of dvds at DHs office, but they tend to not be as updated.

When my old laptop crashed, I didn't panic as I knew that my stuff was safe. We downloaded my stuff and I go on as usual!

 

[gacompguy]

I just signed up for the 15 day trial- the initial backup is going painfully slow and only at about 10% of 600GB after almost a week. It does seem to operate in the background fairly well so you don't really notice it.

This is pretty standard... The slow upload speed isn't caused by Carbonite or any other online backup service; it is caused by your ISP. Most Internet Service Providers cap your upstream speed since the vast majority of their average customers are downloading much more than they are uploading. Several of the online backup providers will let you seed your initial backup so that you don't have to wait for 100's of gigs of data to upload.

I've tried most of the backup services out there: Mozy, Carbonite, IDrive, etc. After needing to restore files, both locally and from a system I didn't have access to, CrashPlan was by far the best. Like many households, we have multiple computers in the house. CrashPlan's Family Unlimited plan is the only plan I've seen with any of the major online backup companies that lets me back up every PC in my house without having to worry about how much data we have, how many computers there are, or the fact that we have both Mac's and PC's. I pay one price once a year and can back up unlimited data from up to 10 computers without having to worry about additional charges when we get a new computer in the house.

 

[eddy-4]

One thing I was disappointed in was it only backs up your c-drive- not external drives which is where my pictures are. I moved all my family pictures to my internal drive but am still looking for a better way to back up my 2x 1TB external drives.

Thank you, Gdad, that was one of my concerns. All of my pictures are on a 2TB external and I've contemplated instead of going with Carbonite just getting another one and storing that in an off-site location.

 

[photo_chick]

I've been using carbonite. For me it works because I'm just backing up my c: drive on my laptop. It's where I keep all of my working files and I can backup from anywhere, which is really handy for me.

 

[Groucho]

I did a bunch of research a year or two ago for the company I work for, and determined that Mozy was the best offering at the time. Since then, we became a MozyPro reseller (the business version) and I've been using MozyHome for quite a while.

I can't recommend it highly enough. Right off the bat, they have a free 2gb backup for anyone. No strings attached. There's no excuse to not run that to at least back up your documents and email, if nothing else. You can use referral codes to increase your space - the account we use for Mrs Groucho's laptop is up to somewhere around 5.5 gigs. The software is the same, so you can get a feel for how it works. It's also pretty tolerant of moving folders around (which I do a bit), not taking too long to verify that the moved files are the same as the backups.

You do pay per PC. I'm not familiar with CrashPlan, but one price per household is not a bad deal. Presumably they do by IP address, since multiple PCs in our house will likely all be using the same IP.

All in all, I am very pleased. The software is updated regularly and has gotten faster and faster and better and better. Support is very good. As with all online backups, you are limited via upload speed. When I had 384k/s upload speeds, it was quite slow. I'm at 1m now and it's not too bad. When I dump a full memory card or two on, it usually takes a day or less to catch up. I suspect that when I return from my current trip, it will take a week or two (or three) to get it all backed up.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I love the concept of online backups, but only as a backup and not as an offline storage company. You never know when they will go out of business. The chances at any one point in time are small, so the chances of that happening exactly when you also lose your data are home are very small. Just make sure that you have all of your data at home AND with the online backup company. Don't delete your data at home under the assumption that you can always get it back later from the online storage company.

 

[Groucho]

I love the concept of online backups, but only as a backup and not as an offline storage company. You never know when they will go out of business. The chances at any one point in time are small, so the chances of that happening exactly when you also lose your data are home are very small. Just make sure that you have all of your data at home AND with the online backup company. Don't delete your data at home under the assumption that you can always get it back later from the online storage company.

True. One nice feature that Mozy recently added was the ability to backup to a local drive in addition to their servers. I saw a 2tb drive for $80 the other day and considered grabbing it exclusively for local backups. One of these days I will. That way, you have the convenience and speed of local backups but the security of proper, secured storage without fear of your backups being corrupted.

 

[gacompguy]

You do pay per PC. I'm not familiar with CrashPlan, but one price per household is not a bad deal. Presumably they do by IP address, since multiple PCs in our house will likely all be using the same IP.

Ehh... not exactly... When you install the software, you have to enter a username and password (just like every other major online backup). You can have up to 10 computers with the software installed using your account.

True. One nice feature that Mozy recently added was the ability to backup to a local drive in addition to their servers. I saw a 2tb drive for $80 the other day and considered grabbing it exclusively for local backups. One of these days I will. That way, you have the convenience and speed of local backups but the security of proper, secured storage without fear of your backups being corrupted.

CrashPlan has had this feature for quite some time. It also has the ability to select multiple backup destinations. So, you can tell it that you want your documents to go to an external drive, online, and grandma's computer in Idaho or that you want your terabytes of video or pictures to just go to an external drive.

Because we have Mac's, I had to be a little more peculiar about what we picked... I've tried the Mac version of Mozy and it was very disappointing. The software had no in-app restore. All restores had to be performed in 1GB chunks on Mozy.com... very painful and incredibly slow. Macworld did a review not too long ago: http://www.macworld.com/article/156511/2010/12/whatonlinebackupservice.html .

 

[mom2rtk]

One thing I was disappointed in was it only backs up your c-drive- not external drives which is where my pictures are. I moved all my family pictures to my internal drive but am still looking for a better way to back up my 2x 1TB external drives.

This is exactly my problem. Is there any service the backs up extrenal drives? I don't have enough C Drive space to put much there and the external drives have worked great. But this issue has always worried me.

I just recently bought an additional 1 TB hard drive that I keep locked away in a closet, mostly protected from theft, but certainly not from fire. I back it up manually every now and then. Not perfect but certainly better than my prior system.......

I'd love to have an automatic system of some sort.

 

[Gdad]

CrashPlan was by far the best.

I took a look at their website- it seems like their $50/yr plan will do unlimited including external drives connected to a single computer but I was not 100% sure from what I read. Do you know how this works?

 

[Groucho]

This is exactly my problem. Is there any service the backs up extrenal drives? I don't have enough C Drive space to put much there and the external drives have worked great. But this issue has always worried me.

I just recently bought an additional 1 TB hard drive that I keep locked away in a closet, mostly protected from theft, but certainly not from fire. I back it up manually every now and then. Not perfect but certainly better than my prior system.......

I'd love to have an automatic system of some sort.

I just checked on this laptop, which uses the free MozyHome, and even the free version of Mozy will back up external drives - it happily lets me select the external drive that I'm using for redundant storage of my photos while on vacation.

From a quick glance at Crashplan, I would not choose them over Mozy, at least not at the $50 price point. Mozy is $55/year and you can always find 10% coupons, bringing it to just a hair cheaper. It's had backup sets forever and Crashpro just added them - an important feature for the average non-techy customer. Virtually every reference I can find comparing them is from a Mac user - and quite frankly, I couldn't care any less about how well anything works on a Mac. There'll still a tiny niche and one that I don't want anything to do with. (I do computer work for a living, and freely admit to having had an anti-Apple bias since the '70s!) That being said, I know Mozy has been continuously improving their Mac client and they freely admitted that it was still rough around the edges (if not an outright beta) in 2009.

As I mentioned earlier, they offer 100% free 2gb backup. Not a trial. Not a limited-functionality client. The full product. It's worth trying. I suspect that reason that the majority of references to Crashplan being from Macs are that they were not well supposed by the online backup providers for a long time. In the PC world, people use Mozy or Carbonite and they just work, no need to shop around. If you have three PCs to back up, then maybe it's worth considering Crashplan. For those who haven't looked - the ability to grab multiple PCs is $120/year. They also appear to not offer the ability to buy for less than a year.

Just out of curiousity - I know these numbers don't really mean much, but they are sort of telling.
2/3rds of all "mozy crashplan" Google search results disappear when you tell it to ignore anything with "mac" on the page. Lots of Mac people comparing them, not so many PC.
"mozy backup" has over 10x as many results as "crashplan backup". Good to know if you are concerned about the long-term solvency of your backup provider - Mozy and Carbonite are the big dogs.

At the end of the day, though - whether it's Mozy, Carbonite, Crashplan, or another, I still think online backup is a solid solution and generally a lot better than buying an external drive and copying your data over manually (or even using a basic backup program.)

 

[Revan]

I really want a Drobo, but they are so expensive. I currently use two external drives, one is a raid and I use Carbon Copy Cloner to automate my backups. I've used Carbonite, my last company was funded by the same venture capitalists.

My ideal solution would be a Drobo with Mozy - I'm on a Mac, but realize that the online solution is only in case of a fire/theft; by far the more likely problem will be hard drive failure.

 

[YesDear]

Jeff: I currently use carbonite for my main pc. I signed up in June of 2010 and have about 575gb of info on three hard drives in the computer. It still has 13 gbs of info to download to get finished with my initial download. That is 6 months it has taken to get a full backup. I get about 384 upload. So I have heard really good things about carbonite but I am seriously looking at crashplan.

Unlike some on this board that have kept their heads in the sand about the qualities of a mac. ( a mac today is not the mac of the 70's) our household has three pc's and three mac's for two people! That is not including ipads, etc.

Each of our mac laptops have external hard drives so a single plan that allows to back them all up is appealing.

I also have a 1tb external drive on each of the macs that will back up with time machine. That is one of those mac things for the uninformed. It works great on the individual computers.

The bottom line for me is that carbonite is the biggest guy on the block but very slow for the initial upload with large amounts of info.

I am seriously looking at crashplan but as a mac rebel I guess that is what I would do!

 

[Groucho]

The bottom line for me is that carbonite is the biggest guy on the block but very slow for the initial upload with large amounts of info.

That's not surprising. Do you know what your ISP's upload speed is?

575 gigs is a awful lot of data. If you have a 384k upload speed, it would not be surprising if it is taking literally months for the initial backup. Generally, home broadband internet connections have fast download speeds and slow upload speeds, since most people don't do much uploading.

Mozy has a slider to select the balance between fast uploading and a fast computer. (It's not a big difference in terms of CPU speed, but a slow PC on a fast connection might notice it being a little slow during the backup.) I don't know if Carbonite has such a thing, but you could check that. Also see if there's a summary of the upload speed; you can see how it compares to the speeds that your internet provider claims.

As for Apples, I've disliked Apple for over 3/4 of my life; I'm not likely to change any time soon. Their current extremely user-hostile, developer-hostile, press-hostile, and greedy policies are not certainly not helping! Many/most Mac fans often admit that Apple itself is not a very nice company; I'd certainly say that they are much more evil than even the hated Microsoft. So, no offense to users of the system, but I really, really don't concern myself too much with how anything works on them. I'm pretty sure if weren't for the ipod and their brutal tying of it to their own music system, the company would be dead and buried by now. I think it was down to 2.5% or less of the PC market before the ipod - I think it might have come back to 4-5% now. The popularity of Windows 7 isn't going to help their Mac business any, their tying to AT&T's lousy service has given Google a firm foothold with the Android over the iphone, and MP3 players are fairly ubiquitous. I'm thinking that they're going to start trending downwards again before too long.

Oh, and I despise the "shiny white plastic" look that they have pushed.

Sorry for the tangent! Point being, all the major online backup providers offer free trials or free limited-capacity versions and I believe all offer compression before uploading and none can overcome a slow internet provider's upload speed. By and large, the differences are pretty small.

 

[ohiochap]

Reading some of the posts it may be possible that people are looking at backing up in the wrong way. Here is what I do, I usually back up only information that I put on the computer, such as documents, photos, videos and the programs themselves I don't backup. Once I put the program on my computer I just take the software home or leave here in my office. I guess I have never been thru a full restore, but I would imagine that some of the software may need to have the keys to be re-entered, I am not sure. Oh well just my two cents. Have a wondering Disney Day and New Year. Patrick

 

[Code]

If you have family/friends with extra storage/bandwidth, consider CrashPlan.. the free version lets you set up remote backups to others' machines. I helped set my parents up with a 500GB external HDD for backups (because that's the smallest I could get) but it's still way more space than they'll ever need. I use some of that extra space for my offsite backup.

Bonus with this method is I borrowed the drive to do the initial backup at my place, then returned it to them. No huge initial upload.