It's not almost too good to be true.
There is a clause in the terms of service that you may want to pay attention to:
Quote:
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IF YOU ARE A PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER, YOUR USE OF CARBONITE PRODUCTS IS SUBJECT TO CARBONITE’S "TERMINATION AND FAIR USE POLICY FOR PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMERS.” YOU WILL BE IN VIOLATION OF THIS POLICY IF, WITHIN ANY MONTH, YOUR USAGE GREATLY EXCEEDS MORE THAN THE AVERAGE LEVEL OF MONTHLY USAGE OF CARBONITE’S PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMERS GENERALLY. FOR PURPOSES OF THIS POLICY, "USAGE" MEANS THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF BANDWIDTH OR STORAGE REQUIREMENTS GENERATED BY BACKING UP YOUR COMPUTER, AS DETERMINED BY US IN OUR SOLE DISCRETION. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO, AT ANYTIME, ENFORCE THIS POLICY IN ACCORDANCE WITH ITS TERMS (I.E., USAGE WITHIN ANY MONTH IN EXCESS OF MORE THAN THE AVERAGE LEVEL OF MONTHLY USAGE OF OUR PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMERS GENERALLY). IN THE EVENT THAT YOU ARE DEEMED TO HAVE VIOLATED THIS POLICY, A CARBONITE REPRESENTATIVE WILL ATTEMPT TO CONTACT YOU TO REACH AGREEMENT ON A REVISED PRICING PLAN WHICH WILL PERMIT YOU TO CONTINUE TO USE THIS PAID SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE. HOWEVER, CARBONITE RESERVES THE RIGHT TO TERMINATE OR SUSPEND YOUR ACCOUNT WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE IN THE EVENT OF A POLICY VIOLATION. ANY FAILURE BY CARBONITE TO ENFORCE THIS POLICY WILL NOT PRECLUDE US FROM ENFORCING IT AT ANYTIME IN THE FUTURE, WHETHER FOR PAST OR CURRENT VIOLATIONS.
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If you're backing up 100GB of data, one of two things is going to happen:
1) They're going to cancel your account for violation of the terms of service or force you to upgrade to a more expensive account.
2) They're going to go out of business.
I handle off-site backup for a half dozen high volume (100GB+) users and can promise you that the numbers don't work at $5/month for that kind of volume.
Consider this:
10 users with 100GB each require 1TB of storage. If you're doing it right, you need a server with 1TB of RAID storage for those 10 users. That server is going to run you about $3,000 which means that it takes about five years to recover the cost of storage for those users before buying bandwidth.
Either the numbers won't work and they go out of business or the numbers won't work and they're going to require you to cough up more than $5/month.
There is a reason that major services charge $300-600/year for 10GB.