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    Carbonite Review: Cloud Backup Discussion

    Discussion in 'Notebook News and Reviews' started by Ted Needleman, Aug 14, 2012.

  1. Ted Needleman

    Ted Needleman Notebook Enthusiast NBR Reviewer

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  2. vertical2010

    vertical2010 Notebook Consultant

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    Much better services out there now, with more features and easier to use. Plus Carbonite is still losing money hand over fist - nearly $70 million since 2009, quite a bit for a company with a market cap of only $200 million. I would be worried about what would happen to my data if they go under.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 7, 2015
  3. cknobman

    cknobman Notebook Consultant

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    I really considered using Carbonite as just last week I decided to use a cloud backup service for the first time.

    Once I started really looking into it though I noticed for my situation(and maybe anyones) Carbonite had some major downfalls.
    If you look at consumer reviews there are a lot and I mean a lot of people that are very dissatisfied with Carbonites service and quite a few people that have claims of their backups not working. Everything seems to be working fine, Carbonite showing its backup up their data with no problems, until they experience an actual data loss and then have to get the data back out of Carbonite.

    Also they throttle you pretty severely on data backup speed. Your first "throttle" is actually hit at 50GB and you are slowed down pretty considerably but then you are throttled again at 200GB to a speed so slow it would take months of non stop backing up to be able to reach 1TB of backup. So while Carbonite is officially "unlimited" for all practical purposes its limited to 200GB. This wont work for me as I have about 1.2TB to back up and that value will only grow as time goes by.

    Right now I am on the 30 day trial of CrashPlan. Unlimited cloud storage with no "throttling" and the cost is cheaper than Carbonite. If all goes well I will post back and let you know.

    I have only had the service for 4 days and 2 of those I was not able to run the backup (found out this morning one of my kids shut down the server). So in 2 days of backing up I have been able to get 170GB of 881GB I chose to backup on the cloud.

    Once my entire backup is complete the first thing I am going to do is try to restore it to an alternate drive.

    If I am able to successfully complete the backup and restore it, before my trial is complete, with no problems then I will purchase their service.