Software Review: Carbonite

[gabrielcrowe]

http://www.carbonite.com/

When skimming the forum a few days ago, i stumbled across a post about backups, and someone mentioned Carbonite.

I downloaded their free trial, and I must say, I think its a great tool.

for those who dont want to rtfa;

Your computer is filled with irreplaceable files: emails, photos, music, business contacts and financials. Carbonite automatically and securely backs up the irreplaceable contents of your computer for only $49.95 per year no matter how much stuff you need to back up.

Technical:
Carbonite is a tool that sits on your computer, and watches your files. It is told to back up your documents, and this it does, to an encrypted server online. Mine took 3 days to back up 2 gig of 'essential' data. After that, true to its word, it only takes a tiny amount of time to sync itself afterwards. The software does exactly as it says. It makes me feel comfortable again.

The good things for Actinic people:
Carbonite is set to back up documents and settings for the current user, by default, and this includes the sites folders. It I snapshot to my documents too, that gets sent online as well.

In my docs, i have lots of source code for projects, and also plenty of photoshop files, for sites. I would be pretty screwed without them.

the good thing about this, is that it all happens behind the scenes. Carbonite tags the files with a little orange circle if it is backing it up, and a green one if its online and safe. So you can see if a folder is safely online.

I dont normally review software, and nor do i like to use closed source software like this one, but I couldnt help myself, its only 25 quid a year, for unlimited data.

So, 10/10 Carbonite: All my shops are safe.

[CymraegKev]

Mine took 3 days to back up 2 gig of 'essential' data.

3 days? Blimey!

Thanks for the review though.

[gabrielcrowe]

bear in mind that i move around a lot, and if i sat still, without any other network activity, it'd probably only take one and a half.

[Mark H]

Much of the type of software which only backs up data when a file is changed (which I presume this is) is fine for relatively small amounts of data, but seems to fall over when you point it at a disk containing, say, 350Gb. Have you any idea whether Carbonite could deal with this?

[pinbrook]

if you really wanted to backup 350 gb your best bet would be a proper business oriented service where they provide you with a disk to copy locally and then transport to the secure location, backups post the first one of 350gb would then be fractional.

But in essence smaller/cheaper services are not targetting the type of volume you are asking about.

Carbonite is perfect for the type of backup Gabe describes.

[Mark H]

I'm sure that's right. At the moment we use NTI Shadow to back up (on a scheduled basis) to encrypted disks which are then held off site (doesn't need to be particularly secure). Because of the problems I have described we just split the 350Gb up into different backup jobs in Shadow - it's a pain but it works.

It is certainly easy to generate large amounts of data these days (for instance we have started scanning all documents), and to store it too (laptops with 500GB not unusual now). I guess that commonly available backup software, which ultimately runs within the constraints of the operating system, haven't kept pace, so we are always on the lookout for new packages which can easily deal with data volumes that we now consider normal, hence my question about Carbonite. I do note from their website that "a few dozen Gb would be very slow".