I’ve been using Carbonite to backup my desktop for the past few weeks. While Daniel got it going okay, we have encountered two problems:
- I’m on Vista, and since installing it I’ve started getting the blue screen of death. I did not want to attribute that to Carbonite, but when I went to look at some of my backup files, it happened again. Pretty sure it’s Carbonite.
- When I asked Daniel if we should stick with them, he said “no.” Pretty definitive. When I asked why he said, “I’ve sent two questions to their support team and have not received any replies.” Those questions were sent over three weeks ago.
It’s funny, but I bet if Daniel had got a reply to his questions, we would not have canceled our account. I will give them this, they sent me to a pretty good customer survey when I canceled. I filled it out. That was a good experience.
Can anyone recommend a remote file backup service? Preferably one that is Vista-safe?
Copyright © 2000-2007
10:03 am
Hi Mike,
I apologize that you did not receive a faster response to your support request. I’d like to figure out why you didn’t receive a prompt response so that we can serve our customers better in the future. Could you please let us know when and how you submitted your request? For example, did you:
* Submit your request online at http://www.carbonite.com/customersupport?
* Submit your request through the Carbonite InfoCenter (Get Support page)?
* Send an email to customersupport@carbonite.com?
* or none of the above?
If you’re willing to try the software again, I’d be happy to work with you directly to get things up and running properly, and to see if we can determine why you had a BSoD problem. Please let me know if you’d like my assistance.
Sincerely,
Len Pallazola
Carbonite Customer Support
10:09 am
Carbonite is terrible. I am with Daniel on this one. I have been trying to uninstall it for months now and have finally just given up. Even when you think you have it uninstalled, you continue to have the colors by all your folders and the task thing still pops up in the lower right hand corner. Do a web search and you will find out that MANY people have the same problem and cannot uninstall it. It’s a pain in the butt.
I have since switched over to Mozy (www.mozy.com) and they have been absolutely fantastic. I have never needed tech support so I don’t know about that, but the program itself is very easy to use and install.
You will find that on their front page they have a comparison of their product vs. all the others and you will see for yourself that it does quite well, including a few features that Carbonite and the others don’t do.
Check it out and I don’t think you will be disappointed.
10:19 am
HAHAHHAHAHAHA!
That is pretty funny. Post something negative on your blog about a company and you get almost an immediate response. E-mail the company and you never get a response. Great job.
That is one thing our company will NEVER do……..only e-mail support. Too many companies do it these days and FAIL MISERABLY at it. Thank you to Freshbooks for keeping the phone lines open and the fantastic customer service always going.
10:26 am
FolderShare now owned by Microsoft is pretty good although I’m not sure what its future holds. In addtiion to their free remove control program LogMeIn has a remote backup tool which I have tried out and is pretty good, I went with the free FolderShare though since I’m cheap.
-QB
11:40 am
Len is attempting to rectify the alleged problem brought up by Freshbooks and in return for his kindness, he is being mocked and insulted by a Freshbooks employee.
First of all, the manner in which Mike unceremoniously dumped on all the good people at Carbonite illustrates that although he appears to champion web based services, he is not a friend of the community. I can assure you that if Mike had sent an email to Carbonite he would have received a prompt response.
Anyone can write a negative review and even the most prestigious company’s in the world have to endure these types of silly reviews. It amazes me that Len’s gesture of goodwill has been met with such a response. It shows the type of attitude the people at Freshbook’s truly subscribe to.
I’m canceling my account at Freshbooks.
11:46 am
Ray - Aaron Foster is *not* a FreshBooks employee…he is a FreshBooks user. Aaron Adams works at FreshBooks…perhaps a case of mistaken identity?
@Len: thank you for dropping by and for being attentive - it’s great to see companies are listening and no support system is flawless. So you know on the exit interview I said I was not interested in trying the service again, but since you made an effort, I’d consider giving Carbonite another whirl. Before I do though, can you speak to the Vista issues? That’s a real stumbling block for me.
11:57 am
Hey Mike:
Have you tried Mozy? Oft-cited competitor to Carbonite and in all the reviews I’ve read they seem to be coming out on top. They made big press a month or so back by signing up GE for something insane like 200k desktops (interesting that even one of the biggest and best corporate IT departments is admitting that it doesn’t have desktop backup under control). I’m using the Mac version, but it’s multi-platform. Sorry … not 100% that they’re Vista ready.
DAVE
11:59 am
Ray, are you serious? Let me give you a tissue to wipe away those tears. Carbonite’s shoddy support is what prompted the post.
I side with Mike. How lame to not get a response until you post something negative.
Three weeks with no response? c’mon.
12:00 pm
If I may be so bold … if you use my referral link when you sign up, I get a little Mozy love: https://mozy.com/?ref=35QLCK
DAVE
12:09 pm
Looks like Mozy does support Vista:
http://mozy.com/support/faq
1:27 pm
Just do it Mike…….you know you want to………..you won’t regret. Get Daniel to do the same thing……..heck, get the whole office doing the same thing.
Aaron
Not a FreshBook employee
5:09 pm
i prefer using online forum and discussion site to keep track my records like bookmark site and digg. perhaps 360view4u.co.uk could be good option, as it allows to keep backup of all online search data.
10:16 pm
I’ve used carbonite for about a year without any trouble. I use it to backup my mce computer which has thousands of gigital pics I’ve taken over the last 6 years. I have used then once to restore about 6Gigs of video. Can’t speak for the vista os. I’d rather not even use it for about 2 years. Heck, they just got xp up to speed!
As for Ray… Sounds like you have an axe to grind. It also sounds like you should take a break, relax and make SURE you corectly identify who your talking to and about before you hit the “submit comment” button.
10:21 pm
oh, please disregard things like “gigital” and weird blackberry typos.
I was seeing if I can spend mindless time on a blackberry to post on a blog. It worked! 
12:34 am
Mike, I think I was the one that suggested Carbonite to you so hopefully it didn’t mess up your computer.
I’ve got more than a few suggestions for what can help depending on what you need. Just give me some info on what you need/want and I’ll jot in a little post for everyone and I’ll email and tell you what I’ve been up to.
On to the questions that everyone needs to answer to pick their ideal service:
Do you need instant automatic backup like Carbonite or are periodic scheduled backups good enough?
Do you need file versioning? If so how many is enough?
Do you need online remote access or simply a data dump from a program to restore?
Do you simply need file backup or complete system backup?
Do you need to share files at all? If so do you need it to be password protected?
Do you need to have one account work on several computers or is having a seperate service plans for each computer acceptable?
Is this for backup only or do you want it to double as an online file access?
Do you need explorer integration?
Do you need quick pick options like “Desktop, Favortites, My Documents” or is a browse and select good enough?
Do you need the ability to pick individual files or is folder level options good enough?
Do you need to have the capability to restore to the same location or is downloading the file and browsing for the restore location acceptable?
What are you backing up is it just files or do you need the option for SQL or exchange backup?
Why are you doing an online backup vs offline drive backup?
Is a private personal encryption key important or is simply having SSL encryption itself good enough?
Anything else you need?
11:13 am
we’ve had good luck thus far with backupsolutions.com — more expensive but it’s a pretty robust service in terms of what they can backup. don’t know if they’re VISTA-compatible…for a few local PCs we’re looking into Mozy.
4:51 pm
Another vote for Mozy. I use Mozy at home on my Mac Mini and my MacBook and use MozyPro at the office on my XP machine and on my Vista machine. Never failed me once. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
2:46 pm
Take a look at Simply Offsite (www.simplyoffsite.com). Cross platform support - Windows (95 to Vista & 64bit), Linux, Mac (for Mac developers at the moment)… GREAT support :), reasonable pricing, 10 years in the online backup business. The only company to offer server pre-load services.
Have you ever tried backing up 100GB over the internet? Simply Offsite will send you a USB drive to backup your data to, you send it back, it gets loaded on the servers and then you just resume your backup remotely.
4:08 pm
MozyPro the best. I’ve tested all the different online backup solutions and at the time Mozy was a new company and their client was in beta however I stuck with them and glad I did. I am now a reseller and have 10 businesses and all of them love it. Go and check them out. I get e-mail alerts every time a business doesn’t upload so their service is great.
4:15 pm
I’ve been using Carbonite for about 8 months now. My experience has been a little mixed but I still recommend it to friends and family. My “regular” support questions were all well answered within a day, but my “why does the carbonite service periodically use 50% of my Core 2 Duo for 20-30 seconds at a time” didn’t receive as satisfactory of a response. However, I haven’t noticed that issue since their recent upgrade. Personally, I’m a big fan of the unlimited set-it-and-forget-it solution that Carbonite provides, and would recommend you definitely consider a second try.
(I have NO relation to Carbonite, other than being a customer.)
5:30 pm
Can’t speak for any backup company mentioned so far. You might want to look at another one: http://www.crashplan.com
Enjoy and keep up the great work!
Olav
11:32 pm
how about rSync?
Free - and never lets you down.
6:46 am
You might want to check out some Amazon S3-based services: http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html. While I have not used them, Jungle Disk (http://solutions.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=239&categoryID=66) and Altexa (http://solutions.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=229&categoryID=66) look interesting.
I currently use JetS3t (http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html) which works well, but is not exactly a “backup” service.
10:59 pm
I have Carbonite running on three computers. I have asked questions and received good and reasonably responsive answers. I like the company. I find them dependable and will probably continue to use them, but I thank everyone for showing that there are competitors that I was not aware of.
12:31 pm
Carbonite works well for us on Windows XP. It is good to know that it does not work for some and what the potential problems are. Still, we recommend giving it a try for small offices or 1 man shops.
Our experience with it is logged here.
http://techrx.blogspot.com/2007/05/carbonite-dont-stress-back-up-your-hard.html
4:23 pm
I use http://www.ibackup.com. As a developer I have a SQL Server 2005 instance on my machine and they have a plugin that allows you to select which databases to back up as part of your backup set. Their backup tool is also very easy to use and manage.
5:47 pm
I use Carbonite at home and I’ve been very happy with it. However at my work I need some way of managing multiple computers. I’ve been looking at MozyPro as it seems very nice and full featured, but ran into a real snag. It does not support files that are EFS encrypted (the built-in XP encryption). We routinely encrypt our laptop user’s files just in case they’re lost or stolen, so this is a real problem. Does anyone have another OFFSITE backup solution to recommend that’s both centrally managed and handles encrypted files?
gary
11:44 pm
I just tried to ‘pay’ for carbonite after seeing it used by a friend. At first I tried the 15 free days, but it failed to let me download, so I thought I will just pay for it since it looked very usable. I was prompted with a server error and suggested trying to email support. 4 weeks ago I had also tried to find the site but the web site was not even working. I am beginning to believe I should look around at other sites unless carbonite can get their act together??? I am also very upset with software packages that do not uninstall correctly, so I am even more shy of this software solution based on the comments above. Maybe just throwing a USB drive is safer and more robust than some half baked fly by night solution?
7:07 am
i dont like the retension policies..im also not a big fan of free or cheap sites..it seems that people forgot the internet boom..cheap and free were all tried already..on $5.00 its not a wortwhile biz, hard disk space cost approx 50cents a gig before operation costs, so if they have redundant servers it costs them btwn 80 cents and a dollar a gig, that being the case i would be afraid to leave my buisness with a company that is only charging a few bux… i would rather the company make money and provide a good reliable service…for not important or home files etc i guess mozy/carbonite are ok.. for buisnesss etc i would get a service that costs…in my office we use http://www.onlinebackupvault.com and we are very happy.
12:16 am
Just FYI - I use mozy and have never had a problem - I actually needed a restore once and I got it within 3 hours from when I requested it.
It also backs up my external hard drives if they are connected at the time of back up.
1:19 pm
If anyone knows how to get Carbonite off of my computer without throwing it from the top of a 10 story building, please let me know. I have tried everything (and so have others) and cannot get rid of this POS program.
7:12 pm
To Mike, have you happened to see any remotely competitive Canadian based remote backup providers? I have some concerns about storing my data on US servers (Homeland Security, etc), but any Canadian service I’ve found has a website that looks to be circa 1995 and is very overpriced.
One thing I’ll say about Mozy though, it allows users to use their own private encryption key, so if you choose that option even Mozy employees (or authorities) could not read your data, which is good peace of mind if using a USA server.
11:50 am
Chris, you might want to try http://www.datadepositbox.com.
They are proving to be a bit pricey for larger backups, compared to mozypro.com and others, but if I recall correctly, they are based in Canada.
9:06 pm
Carbonite is the worst!
I was excited about the features and the unlimited storage space. Heard lots of ads on the radio. Everything was working fine until I had a registry error which crashed my XP OS on Friday evening. No problem right, I re-imaged the drive using Acronis and went to restore my remaining files using Carbonite. WRONG!!! Carbonite would not restore my important files like Quickbooks, Quicken, and Outlook.pst!!! It keep giving me an error that it could not find the selected files. I lost about 45 days worth of IMPORTANT business invoicing, billing, and email! I quickly went to the website and what do you think I found….NO TELEPHONE NUMBER FOR TECH SUPPORT!!!!! Support was only available through email which was painfully slow and worthless. They keep saying the same basic things over and over, go here, click there, …HELLO, I know which files I need and where they are located, I just need them from YOUR server. After several emails, I just gave up. I just wanted to die! Carbonite tech support was no help at all! They even gave me a link to try the newest version of Carbonite, thinking that would help, which it did not. I admit, it’s my fault for selecting a company with no phone support, DUMB! Never, ever, will I do that again! Do your own backups!!!!! I have sent in several requests for a refund, but no reply. How can you run a company without phone?
11:15 am
Found this site when looking for the answer to a carbonite question. I went to the carbonite site first - but everytime I searched the site crashed. I tried to ‘write’ them but after I completed the form it crashed after I clicked send.
I’ll check out mozy.
12:53 am
Mike, I found your site by typing in “carbonite blue screen” in my search engine. So I strongly suspect that Carbonite is the reason my PC is frequently giving me the BSoD. Yes, I have Vista.
I’m wondering if you ever took Carbonite on their offer of trying to solve your problem? I’d like to know for sure if Carbonite is my problem. Other than that, I have no issues with Carbonite. Could it be that it is just not yet completely compatible with Vista?
Any experience anyone could share with this particular issue would be appreciated. Thanks.
11:23 am
Hey Rob, all I can say is I have taken Carbonite off my Vista machine and since I have done that I have not experienced the blue screen.
3:04 pm
Mike, are you claiming that Google’s search results are inaccurate? I verified Rob Solomon’s claims by typing in “carbonite blue screen” into google and this page was the first link on the first page of their results.
As an SEO professional I would be interested to learn more about why you believe Google’s algorithm is incapable of producing credible results.
I hope that the good peeps at google don’t come across your comment because if they do, they would probably buy your company out and plaster the phrase “carbonite causes blue screen in vista - VERIFIED!” on your home page.
3:39 pm
Rudolf - I think you misunderstood. I was making no inferences about Rob’s search - only my experiences with Vista blue screens AFTER I removed Carbonite (i.e. no more blue screens).
P.S. My background is SEO and I think Google has done a wonderful job of solving a very difficult problem - no beefs with Google here
9:08 pm
I just tried to install carbonite on 2 pc’s (one laptop and one desktop). Both run Vista 32. Software is fairly identical. Both failed to activate with a generic error. I emailed them 2x’s on the issue - first about 7 hours ago. I would really like to try the service - but I can’t get it to work. I already installed Mozy on my laptop - and that is backing up quite happily. I will wait and see if I get an answer by tomorrow. If not - I won’t go. If they can’t respond quickly to an install problem - what will happen wqhen I need assistance to get my files back?
7:50 pm
As a follow up. I got one canned “we have received your request” message with a blurb about maybe getting back by end of next business day. I didn’t get anything. So it’s uninstalled. Sorry Carbonite - I wanted it to work - it just seems like you don’t. BTW - Amazon.com has the boxed version for 44.95 w/ a $30.00 rebate. Sweet. They don’t offer that if you buy direct. Now I just have to find a service that fits my needs…
7:50 pm
Wow- thanks everyone for helping a confused shopper- becoming more aware of the issues of using the services posted above…I still have no idea what service I’m going to uses, but at least I seem educated before making the purchase
11:08 pm
This problems with carbonite support are not unique. I emailed them with questions about business use, told them I was a reseller and wanted to recommend it to my clients, told them I need some specific questions answered…
NEVER once got a response.
So we switched to mozypro.com for our clients, and I’m glad we did. Much better features, and they actually reply when we contact them! Imagine that.
Everybody: Don’t even bother with carbonite.
3:32 am
Haven’t read through all of the posts above, but I have had absolutely no problems with Mozy and Vista (32-bit Ultimate) and I’ve been using it for five months now.
Great product. I only have two beefs:
1. When having a larger backup set (~40GB), when initiating a backup it takes a long time (even with Core2Duo etc.) to work its way through “Reticulating splines” etc. before finally starting. That’s not a problem unless you actually want to change the speed (you have a slider that you can adjust slow backup/fast computer to fast backup/more CPU usage. You have to wait (minutes) and only then are you able to adjust the speed. It’s a little faster to go to configuration, but still annoying time waster when you for i.e. when you want to crank up the backup speed because you’re done for the day. It would be great to just get to the config without wait. If you don’t adjust, it usually ends up more often than not with the wrong speed: you’re either having brutally slow backups occurring when you’re away from your machine, or all CPU cycles are used up when you’re trying to work.
2. When doing a repave, you must delete your account online (with all up to date backups) before being able to start backing up again from the just repaved machine (bad Mozy bad). Then it takes a week or two to get caught up again (not Mozy’s fault: up in Canada upload rates are ridiculously expensive and slow compared to what’s available in the States) so in the meantime you don’t have a full off site backup through Mozy, and you’re using every spare CPU & bandwidth cycle to get backups back up.
Otherwise great.
11:30 am
I’ve got 800 kbps upstream to go with my 8 Mbps down… not great, obviously, but at least Canadian broadband isn’t as terrible as, say, mobile service.
Also, kudos to Mozy for the awesome reference AND awesome customer service.
2:50 pm
Yes, Canadian mobile service is horrible. I’m referring to Scott Hanselman’s 15 up AND 15 down Verizon FIOS service “for just a little more” than his previous 15/2 service which was still only $50/month (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/LeavingComcastForVerizonFiosUpgradingTheHomeNetworkToFiberOptic.aspx)
Currently I can get 10/.5 for the same cost. I know we’re spread out, but you’d think the infrastructure is enough in place for better pricing, or rather, better performance at least in urban areas.
Didn’t know the reticulating spline reference.
6:05 pm
Well, yeah, I can understand why FTTP services like FiOS aren’t happening ’round here anytime soon. But I do sincerely doubt the difference between your 10/.5 or my 8/.8 and his 15/15 comes entirely down to the last mile… Rogers and Bell simply don’t see the kind of competition as providers in the States, so there’s no urgent need to improve.
15/15… that’s just not fair.
12:35 am
I too have had the same issue with Carbonite. I have sent 3 emails and none have been answered in over a month. How any company can let a customer fall through the cracks by not offering ANY kind of service other than email boggles my mind.
5:53 pm
I was just about to sign up for Carbonite, now I’m all confused. Carbonite or Mozy?
7:55 pm
I use both Carbonite and Mozy on my personal computers and like them both. I like Carbonite’s interface and style a bit more, but I don’t think you can go wrong with either. (I avoid Vista though so I can’t speak to that.)
3:00 am
well, i have already bought the annual subscription for one of my computers from mozy & it has been at work, having backed up around 4.8 GB so far. i am considering buying the subscription for my second machine but i have been all confused!! but after having read through all the user reviews & keeping in mind the optimum money utilisation, i am sure, now i would subscribe to mozy. the reason for that is more than obvious, one would not even want to imagine depending on a company that doesn’t believe in sharing the phone numbers. what if i desperately need some support? then is the issue of no monthly plans with carbonite. they only have an annual plan, whereby, one would be bound with them in case one doesn’t really like them. & while i agree that the other services maybe better than these once, in the given price range, i think, these are the only two, please correct me if i am wrong. out of these two, i second mozy for sure.
4:38 pm
I tried a promo carbonite had and when I realised it’s not what I need I tried to uninstall it but only part of it uninstalled and the shell and whatever else there was left left a message saying denied when tried to uninstall it with windows and other uninstall programs. I ended up getting a response to my email so I figured I’d pass it on because I think I saw somebody else had the same problem here. This is what they said to get it off your computer:
If an incomplete installation is preventing both a reinstall and an uninstall, we suggest that you follow the steps below to manually remove the Carbonite program files.
Reboot your computer.
Open My Computer and browse to C:\Program Files\Carbonite\Carbonite Backup.
Right-click on CarboniteService.exe and rename it to CarboniteService.old.
Right-click on CarboniteUI.exe and rename it to CarboniteUI.old.
Right-click on CarboniteNSE.dll and rename it to CarboniteNSE.old.
Reboot your computer again.
Open My Computer and browse to C:\Program Files\Carbonite\Carbonite Backup.
Delete CarboniteService.old, CarboniteUI.old, and CarboniteNSE.old.
Reboot your computer one more time.
The three reboots, while tedious, are very important in order to unload and remove the program successfully.
6:36 pm
I have had Carbomite installed on an XP PC for 18 months or so and had no problem installing or using…
until recently when there was a problem about the service being down, except it wasn’t immediately apparent [after all they go on about how it saves without you noticing and I am a mere novice about computers with no technical knowledge] and then it was definitely a problem for in excess of 24 hours..
nor did I recive an e-mail about the problem or how to overcome…
I eventually found a forum which explained the problem and how to sort it by reinstalling..except it then took me hours even to get onto the site [try it yourself if you have a few hours to waste].
I then had to reinstall again a week later…e-mails to customer service were slowly responded to and no real explanation or apology.
But since then things have been OK and for the most part I was satisfied with my subscription.
Take note this was an XP machine.
I have now networked a Vista PC and wanted to use Carbonite.
Boy, just forget it.
It is supposed to be easy - that’s what the Home Page tells you - but it isn’t.
The endless e-mails to and from Customer Service - their replies requiring me to uninstall and reboot and disable Windows Defender or Norton Firewall or Spybot etc etec etc.
Even when I finally got onto the website or to the Manage screen [in itself took days as the server seems to go on and off like a yo-yo] reinstalling was fine to a point but mostly blew out at some point or another.
Only once in the last four days have I completed installation, Then when 73% through initial back up it stopped and that was that.
I am at this moment trying to get back on to the Manage site to reinstall having uninstalled etc etc
Its like a soap on TV except more annoying and ridiculous.
Have starting ccing the VP of Customer Care - remains to see if he cares.
Is it a problem with Carbonite conflicting with Vista? I am not having any problems with my XP machine for back-ups although I can’t get to the Manage screen on that machine most times I try.
11:18 pm
I been a Mozy customer for almost a year. Currently doing a restore for the past couple days and my downloads do NOT exceed 95k/sec. This is unbelievable. Just so you know, I did a speadtest throgh speakeasy and dowloading at 9mb/sec. So as you can see along with many other Mozy users on the web, the restore sucks for Mozy. The live chat support doesn’t work on weekends and they pretty much didn’t help the one time i did get through. They just say “we are experience a lot of restores right now”. Come on!! For a week now 24 hours a day? Everything else on Mozy works fine. Restore Sucks. There is my 2 cents about Mozy. If they can fix the restore, it would be perfect option for off site backups.
Mike
12:48 am
Very Very dissapointed in Carbonite…I agree that it worked fine for almost a year…until I needed to restore my files…it did back up all the files it was supposed to…silent, in the backgound etc…then I purchased a new computer…my old hard drive was wiped but I wasn’t worried. I had Carbonite…long story short, I couldn’t get it to install and I lost over 15gbyts of files…Once I finally got a hold of a customer service tech rep (50mins on hold) he spent over 2hrs trying to restore my files…he was at a loss as to why and I he arranged for a refund of $49 dollars back…a pretty fair trade in return for thousands of files, family photos’ and family videos…needless to say, I’m backing up the old fasion way…with a 250gig external harddrive…this online back up is waaay to risky…another thing I found very disturbing with Carbonite is while on hold ( forever) a recording keeps coming on repeating the option to bypass being on hold by pressing the star sign and paying an addtional $19.00 for the “priority costumer support line”…it says you then get to speak to a tech rep right away with no wait and get “red carpet” treatment…shouldn’t all costumers get that treatment!!!!…nothing like being on hold til the end of time and feeling like you are being forced into paying more money to be a “priority” customer.
2:26 am
I use SOS Online Backup. It does cost a little more but definitely not unreasonable. The feature set remains far ahead of the rest of the online backup solutions.
12:31 am
I’ve seen Memopal (www.memopal.com) recently, and was impressed by the site blurb, and some scattered reviewed on the web. Looks like good “get-your-files-anywhere” service.
Italian company, so I wonder how service will be to the states …
Considering now Mozy, or Memopal?
3:57 pm
I’ve been using Amazon S3 services (15 cents per GIG, unlimited space) in conjunction with Jungle Disk ($20 one time fee for the software) for over a year now. I’ve been very pleased with the service.
10:58 pm
I really wish I had read these reviews before I wasted my money on Carbonite. I purchased it in September 2007 and backed up my files on my computer, it took three days and everything was fine. However, I recently got a new computer and all I wanted to do was restore my files…which I thought would be “simple”….I was definitely wrong. After 4 days, Carbonite has frozen my computer twice and is also only 4% done restoring my files. I spent 35 minutes on hold trying to find out it what was going on. All the tech person could tell me was that the Restore Status bar probably wasn’t working properly and that my files were in fact being restored….when I was on the phone with him it was around 8% and now back to 4%?
I just purchased an external harddrive and am backing up my files manually. Thank God I hooked up old computer back up and was able to salvage my files…I know others haven’t been as lucky. I have so many files on this computer having had it for 5 years…there is a lot to lose. I will never use an online backup system ever again…I’m just backing up my files the old fashioned way!
7:13 pm
I can’t thank everyone enough for taking the time to share your experiences and write these incredibly helpful (and detailed!) accounts. I was all set to sign up with carbonite, but you have definitely convinced me that mozy is the way to go. However, just to be on the safe side, I think I’ll continue saving backups to my external drive (at least monthly, anyway); that way I’ll have both fast retrieval of backed-up files AND the security of off-site storage.
11:06 am
I started using Carbonite a couple of months ago and was very happy with it till a few days ago. It stopped backups, Status: Backup Pending. Restore wasn’t working either. I sent messages to support, no replies. Interesting that they were very responsive before I subscribed for 2 years.
After 4 days, it started backing up files again, and I mean *again*…. all the previously backed up files (about 22 GB). 3 days now, and it’s still doing this. All previous green dots became yellow.
I spent 2 hours yesterday waiting on the phone for tech support before I gave up. I’m holding right now; Recording said I’m the 3rd person, how long can that be (rhetorical question).
More messages to them, both emails and web support. No replies, not even confirmations of receipt.
I can’t tell if they’re still there, or are all on vacation.
Most important, I don’t know if the original files are still backed up with them.
Thanks for listening.
2:12 pm
I was using Carbonite until I figured out that JungleDisk was much better. JungleDisk uses Amazon S3 and doesn’t get involved in what you back up. It stays out of the way and just presents your S3 data as a mapped drive. The JungleDisk client backs up to the S3 servers and you can transfer whatever you want whenever you want, and it does automated backups too.
It is great for power users because it is similar to doing a backup to an external backup drive. The data is actually stored at Amazon, so it has a good infrastrucuture.
Also, it’s great for getting at your data from a remote location or from a computer in your office at work. I totally recommend JungleDisk for everyone. It kills Carbonite.
-Thom