[bbarker]

Thanks Jason.

[bbarker]

Thanks Jason.

[pmgibson]

Originally Posted by JMac

Jon,

Agreed. Of course I wouldn't send, say, my Quicken financial data, or anything extremely personal that could lead to ID theft.

Ah, but that Quicken file is one of two absolutely critical files. The other being the Outlook PST file.

So online backup is the best way to backup the critical Quicken file, but then privacy/security could become an issue.

Maybe I need to look into Jasons "FTP server at a friend's house" idea more. :?

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by pmgibson

Ah, but that Quicken file is one of two absolutely critical files. The other being the Outlook PST file.

Password protect it then. :-) I imagine Quicken's file encryption is decent, I have a password on mine.

Swami never came back to clarify this, but no Carbonite employee can access the data on their servers UNLESS you contact them because you've lost your password.

[sigother]

I tried the Carbonite service based on this article. Nice idea however I ran into a couple of problems.
1. After 5 days the service had still not backed up my 20GB of data. I have a high speed cable modem. Maybe it is just not practical to use this service with this amount of data and this bandwidth.
2. My bigger issue was if I did have to restore, it looks like it would take several days to reload my data. For me, that would not be an acceptable backup solution.
3. After installing the service, I had 2 BSOD - no really! I have not seen a BSOD on XP for months. I also had problems accessing the files in a zip archive. I could not extract some files and some were tagged as needing a password even though that should not have been the case. I can not say for sure that Carbonite caused this, however ...
At this point, I uninstalled Carbonite. No more blue screens and my zip archives worked fine.
Maybe this is a coincidence but for me not worth the risk.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by sigother

1. After 5 days the service had still not backed up my 20GB of data. I have a high speed cable modem. Maybe it is just not practical to use this service with this amount of data and this bandwidth.

Well...I guess that's a matter of understanding bandwidth. Your "high speed" cable modem is probably about 800 KB/s downloading, but only 64 KB/s uploading. So if you have 20 gigs of data, you can do the math. ;-) Perhaps I wasn't obvious enough in my article about the speed limitations, my apologies for that.

Originally Posted by sigother

2. My bigger issue was if I did have to restore, it looks like it would take several days to reload my data. For me, that would not be an acceptable backup solution.

But what were you expecting? I think perhaps you may be thinking of online back up as being the PRIMARY method of data backup - it should not be. A local hard drive (external or secondary internal) should always be the #1 choice for backups, because of exactl your complaints: speed. The online backup is a fallback in case something happens to your primary backup. Yes, it has some limitations, but I think you'll be glad to live with them if it's the ONLY place you can get your data from. ;-)

Originally Posted by sigother

3. After installing the service, I had 2 BSOD

Yikes! That is indeed bad news...I haven't had any such problems, but every machine is different. Stupid unstable XP! :roll:

[trashpicker]

I'm a new Carbonite user referred there by Chris Pirillo's blog and wanted to share some things here for the people who may be considering Carbonite.

I have about 130GB to backup. Admittedly, this is a huge block of data but Carbonite advertises themselves as "unlimited" and shows 40GB on their homepage. After about 5 days of backup, I got an email from Carbonite telling me "Your account has been disabled temporarily. You must either reduced [sic] your pending backup size so that it falls below 100GB or cancel your account."

I did neither but emailed their support with my concerns regarding the vagarities of the TOS (previously mentioned in this thread) and advertising and asked them if there was a second tier plan. I haven't heard back. My backup continues.

Which brings me to my second point - speed. I'm a Fiber Optic user and get very high upload speeds but have been disappointed by Carbonite's speed which to my mind does not take advantage of available upload bandwidth. I'm 12 days in of nearly continuous uptime with minimal interruptions, and only about 30% complete.

These things being said, I LOVE the interface and the concept is awesome. I have never seen anything simpler for backup and I sincerely hope that they can work out the business to meet all customers' needs. I paid for my year today despite the earlier email and I guess we'll see what happens.

I'd definitely recommend Carbonite to family users who need simple, no-hassle backup and hope that they can find space in their model for users like me.

See also this guy's experience and this other post by another guy

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by trashpicker

I have about 130GB to backup. Admittedly, this is a huge block of data but Carbonite advertises themselves as "unlimited" and shows 40GB on their homepage. After about 5 days of backup, I got an email from Carbonite telling me "Your account has been disabled temporarily. You must either reduced [sic] your pending backup size so that it falls below 100GB or cancel your account."

Hmm. That's not cool at all - if you had told me you were trying to back up your 2TB drive array maybe I'd cut Carbonite some slack, but 130 GB isn't far off my own 100 GB of data, so if they're threatening to cancel your account that means if I wasn't an affiliate they'd do the same to me. Preferential treatment is not cool - I wouldn't have recommended this service so strongly if I knew by "unlimited" they meant "anything under 100 GB". I've emailed my contact at Carbonite though and have asked for his thoughts on this, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now and hope that this isn't them changing their stance. :?

[trashpicker]

Gave up a couple of days ago - it was just going so slowly that I couldn't take it. Sent an email requesting cancellation and haven't heard back yet.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by trashpicker

Gave up a couple of days ago - it was just going so slowly that I couldn't take it.

Maybe this is a stupid question, but has your hard drive sent you an email that it's planning on crashing or something? ;-) I don't get the "it's too slow" complaint - where does your data have to be? It took me about two or three weeks to do my first back up of 30 GB. Maybe I didn't notice/care as much because it's running on my MCE computer, not my main workstation.

BTW, I updated my article with a footnote about the somewhat confusing nature of "unlimited" backup. It seems Carbonite still has to work out some kinks in their service plan and explanation of what they really offer.

[trashpicker]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

has your hard drive sent you an email that it's planning on crashing or something?

In all honesty, the slowness complaint was a combination of the backup speed and the absence of response to my email to Carbonite regarding the "unlimited" backup. I'd be more comfortable taking the time (leaving my machine up 24/7) to back up the full 130GB if they had gotten back to me to say yea or nay, but I've heard nothing. I don't want to be using the electricity to do the back up for the next X weeks if they turn around and close my account (it's not that I'm cheap, I prefer not to use the natural resources for nothing).

Also, I haven't heard back from them yet re my cancellation request. Still love the idea/interface but you can add responsiveness to my list of dislikes (with speed).