Introduction:
Carbonite is advertized as an “Unlimited”, “Online Backup” solution at a “One flat price”. There are many reviews online about Carbonite, most of them are positive and a few negative reviews mostly around bandwidth throttling and some file types being excluded by default from backups unless you manually add them to the backups.
In this review I will be focusing on my experience with Carbonite during the free trial period and after I purchased a 1 year subscription.
Disclaimer:
I am currently working for EMC Corporation which owns Mozy. I don’t have any relationship with Mozy other than the fact that I’m employed at EMC Corporation and have a free employee Mozy account that gives me 50 GB of free backup. This review is my personal review of Carbonite based on my use of their service at home and is not a marketing piece for/against Mozy/Carbonite.
Long story short:
Pros:
- Cheap; only $59 per year
- Fixed price
- Unlimited backup storage space *
- Easy to install and use
Cons:
- On average the upload speed is limited to 5.5 GB per day for the first 200 GB and limited to 1.5 GB per day
- With bandwidth throttled the time taken to do the initial backup is long
- I’ve been running my computer 24 hours a day for 94 days and counting and so far has backed up 266 GB of the total 297 GB
- With the upload speed currently throttled to 1.5 GB per day the remaining 12 GB will take an additional 10 days of running the computer 24 hours a day
- With Carbonite limiting your upload speed don’t expect to get “unlimited backup storage space”
My recommendation:
Should you buy Carbonite?
Your choice. Hopefully this review gives you a good idea what to expect so that you can make a decision on if it is right for you or not.
Am I happy with my purchase?
Sort of. I’d say I’m OK with it. It’s cheap and I was able to backup by data after running my computer 24 hours a day for 3+ months.
Am I happy with the bandwidth throttling?
NO. I understand why as a business they want to limit the uploads. But they could be a bit more transparent about the whole process. Without transparency it is false advertising. Maybe a tiered plan might be better than limiting the upload bandwidth it they are concerned with a few heavy users trying to <quote>abuse<unquote> the “unlimited backup storage space”. But it can hardly be called abuse if users try to make use of what they were advertised.
On their site they claim:
- “you always get as much space as you need for your backup” – but you won’t be able to upload it fast enough. what if you lose the data before it is all backed up?
- “you don’t need to worry about falling into the next storage tier” – you don’t… but they have replaced the tiered space model with a tiered upload speed model
How about restoring?
I have not yet had the reason to use the restore option. Until then I can’t say how good/bad it is. I’ll update this review the first time I do a restore.
That’s it!
For those of you who like to see more data behind the review and a more detailed day by day analysis go to the next page…
Tags: backup, bandwidth, carbonite, limiting, review, throttling, unlimited