BACKUP: Carbonite, Mozy, or Crashplan?

Much as I have wanted to use the option of online storage, when I subscribed to Carbonite, I wound up cancelling almost immediately because it wouldn't play nice with my security software, and I figured the security software was more important. I'm sure it's no fault of Carbonite, just my inability to configure one or the other and my reluctance to get lost in competing support desk hells.

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Why not just buy an external drive that you update weekly and store elsewhere? This would seem like a much better option for my home users. A complete backup of my C: drive which is currently at 592GB would really be cost prohibitive using one of these services. I use Acronis software with an external drives. I update one drive every month and store it off-site. I keep another one locally here on my desk with weekly backups. I am more concerned about drive failure of my C: drive than I am about something catastrophic like a fire happening.

Bob, your information on Carbonite needs updating. Carbonite has five plans, called, in order of increasing price and capacity, "Home," "Home Plus," "Home Premier." Then there are "Business" and "Business Plus." The business categories do not throttle bandwidth. The home categories do.

And, sadly, Carbonite does NOT offer a "seeding" option with an external hard drive. I've mentioned that here before, and I confirmed it again a moment ago with Carbonite customer service.

On the other hand, Crashplan DOES offer such an option, with at least one of their paid plans. Feel free to include that fact in future articles about Crashplan. But not about Carbonite. :-)

Your math is correct: I'm living proof that once you reach the 200 GB limit with a Carbonite home plan, each additional 100GB you want to back up takes about three months to upload. It took me almost a YEAR to completely back up my system using their throttled service. There were many weeks when Carbonite fell seriously behind, because I was updating files far faster than Carbonite was uploading backup copies.

Finally, in frustration, I pulled out my wallet and switched to their Business Plus plan. Full backup (starting from scratch) was completed in less than 45 days. An added bonus: I'm backing up my desktop computer, my laptop, my wife's desktop, AND our the computer of our daughter who lives in another state--all on that one Business Plus plan. We dynamically split the allocated capacity among us.

I use Carbonite and have been able to get back to previous versions of things I was working on several times. The downside is videos must be flagged as "to back up" one by one. The .THM files are saved but not the .MP4.

Good information, Bob. WOW! That leaves me out. I maintain local backups of approximately 500 GB of photographs and home videos. So cost of Cloud storage would be prohibitive for me. I have resorted to semi-monthly backups to a second external hard drive which is stored on our bank safety deposit box. Also our three sons and families have complete sets of DVD's with all the family photos on them. So that is about as "safe" as I can afford.

A few years ago I used Mozy backup and found it very easy to use and not so expensive - until my hard disk crashed. Then it took me ages to get all the data back and it also cost me a lot to download it all.
Now I have an external hard drive which I use for backups.

I'd like to reiterate Rick Conley's comment. An external hard drive works out a lot cheaper than any "cloud" based storage. I bought a 2TB one for $129. Now do the math and tell me which makes the most sense.

I've been using Carbonite since 2008. I find it to be a great service and perfect for my needs. I'm currently backing up around 60GB. I had a hard drive crash last Spring and was able to recover all my data via Carbonite.

I recently discovered that they offer service for my Android device at no additional charge! Carbonite is now backing up all the photos and videos on my Samsung Galaxy S III, as well as offering a lost phone feature that will locate my phone, snap a picture of the perpetrator and wipe my data. I can also send a signal to the phone that will make a noise so I can find it nearby. I'm currently paying a fee to T-Mobile that includes that service so I'm planning to drop that and save myself around $4/month.

Backblaze is very similar to Crashplan, and when I emailed both with questions, Backblaze responded much quicker.

I suppose there are good reasons for using one of these services, but years ago I simply bought an ext USB drive. Now I have two, one at the desk and the other is off site. Once a month I swap them so the worst case would be losing a couple weeks of data. Ext drives are cheap and very fast.

EDITOR'S NOTE: That's the rub... you need to have the discipline to have TWO backup drives, AND remember to swap them every week/month. You've also got to find a good, safe offsite backup location that's not likely to be affected by fire, flood, hurricane, etc.

I have posted the theme of this comment possibly here and certainly elsewhere and had very little response. My point is: How do you upload a large amount of data for back-up (in my case, well over 160 gigs of music and documents), without driving a horse and carriage through an ISP's data cap and without it taking a year and a day to execute? I consider myself lucky that I now have fibre-to-the-cabinet here in the UK with a download of about 25 megs after years of lousy copper-wire snail-like speeds but the upload speed is still only consistently around 5 megs, so how can the upload feat be achieved easily? Cloud back-up seems to me to be impractical for a domestic user with limited resources.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The answer is a "seed drive" or as Mozy calls it, a Shuttle Drive. For your initial backup, they mail you a drive, you load it up, and mail it back.

What about Backblaze? I've been using that service for some time now and am very satisfied with their service.

Quote: "EDITOR'S NOTE: That's the rub... you need to have the discipline to have TWO backup drives, AND remember to swap them every week/month."

Not really. My backups are auto-scheduled so it happens in the background. Also, my email sends a reminder on the first of the month, so I don't have to remember anything, Also, my 200 gb drive would either cost a lot or take forever with these sites. Ext drive takes about 10 minutes.

Obviously lots of PC users on here, because I haven't heard anything said about the built in backup plan for Apple. Apple's "Time Machine" can be configured multiple ways--I currently have mine on an external hard drive. It copies all file changes once an hour for a day, then once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year. It only copies user files, not applications, but I believe that is the way mine is configured. Frankly, it runs in the background and I don't even think about it. I just looked at my screen and it is backing up my system as I type this! As the allocated drive space fills up, it deletes the oldest file. I currently have March 2011 as my oldest archive available. I won't swear to it--like I said, I don't have to even think about this, so I don't--but I believe it dynamically saves more versions based on number of files saved and size of the hard drive available. And I do know that Apple has a wireless networked version now available where you can have all your systems backed up automatically to a single drive. So for Apple users, this is pretty much a "set it and forget it" issue.

I had a subscription to Carbonite for a year, but I switched to iDrive, and I'm happy I did. I left Carbonite because it screwed up so often: several times a month, I'd get a message that I didn't have files selected for backup (but of course I did). I'd have to uninstall and reinstall -- as often as I had to do it, it was a major inconvenience.

A while back I took your suggestion to use JustCloud. This company is not ready for real time. On 3 separate occasions they couldn't find my account, their sync feature doesn't work and when I pointed that out I was told "we're working on it" with a tone that indicated it wasn't too important to them. It only took 3 emails and a phone call to get my money back- at least they say it is coming.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I don't recall mentioning it. Where did you read about it?

I've been using iDrive for about a year and a half. Works fine.

Online backup is better thing for every one ts a very important. you can access this anytime and anywhere…

Livedrive