Comments on: Carbonite vs Mozy Home: A Review and Comparison

By: bill d

bill d — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 05:42:57 +0000

Glad you’ve had such good luck with Carbonite. I’ve had them for a month, but the entire last week I’ve been without service. I wanted to switch my registration to my new computer and come to find out the server my backup is stored on at Carbonite is down, broken, busted, not working, no redundant server, no failover, no disaster recovery. The people at Carbonite don’t really know about running a professional data center, else I’d never have even known there was a down server. And to be on my 7th day of no service is completely intolerable.

By: Jan

Jan — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:13:32 +0000

This reply worries me (I’m an existing user). Home or business, how do you explain that @Moe’s documents were lost? Home users have important documents too.

By: TravisVS

TravisVS — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 01:52:59 +0000

Brian:

You bring up a great point – that Carbonite does not automatically backup videos. I suspect this is due to bandwidth issues. However, you do not need to go through your entire computer and back each video up individually.

All you need to do is right-click the video and move your cursor over the Carbonite menu option. You’ll see, “Properties.” Click on that and you’ll see an option that says, “Back up files of this type (within folders selected for backup).” Check that option and it will backup all videos of that format within that folder.

TravisVS
Site Admin

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:50:45 +0000

I’ve been using Carbonite for > 1 year. The major problem with Carbonite is that it does not automatically backup every file type. Namely, videos. I had to go through my entire video folder and click “back up this file” one by one.

Recently I had to do a complete restoration. Unfortunately, there were video files deeply nested in my Photos folder that I did not manually add to the backup. They are now lost forever. Thanks, Carbonite.

The “Unlimited” storage space feature is puffery. If you are using Carbonite—beware.

By: Michael Kennedy

Michael Kennedy — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 12:00:10 +0000

Both my law partner and I signed up for Carbonite and backed up all our stuff, which included tons of documents and pictures. When her laptop was stolen, she bought a new one and went to Carbonite to restore the stuff backed up, and they had lost all the documents!!! They had the photos, all right, but no pleadings and writings, which, for a law office, is devastating. All they could do is shrug their shoulders!! They will do more[!], but I would never go with them again under any circumstances, so it’s either Mozy or external hard backup system from now on.

By: TravisVS

TravisVS — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 19:45:41 +0000

@Moe:

It sounds like your needs for a backup are primarily for business. There is no doubt that there are better solutions for BUSINESS backup. Carbonite online backup is primarily for the home user that just wants a simple backup solution to protect their files – period. They aren’t targeting the hardcore technical person like yourself – or even general business applications for that matter.

I’m a perfect example of the typical Carbonite user – a home user who uses his computer a lot who already does a local backup but wants an extra layer of insurance in case the worst happens. In short, a guy who wants a simple, “set and forget” backup. That’s what Carbonite offers.

I have over 200GB of data backed up with Carbonite and I’ve been using them for over 2 years now without any issues at all. For me, it just works. I also use their remote access capabilities using their mobile apps and they work flawlessly as well.

I respect your opinion of why Carbonite doesn’t work for you, but for others reading your comments, it’s important people realize that your needs are very different from the typical user Carbonite is targeting.

TravisVS
Site Admin

By: Moe Jackply

Moe Jackply — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 15:09:54 +0000

I’m a computer architect and as you know Cloud Backup is not easy, everyone is claiming to be the best and sadly not all know the meaning of cloud backup, first of all, speed, carbonite is very very slow comparing to other backup software, and i will never trust my data with carbonite, we all do remember they lost their data in 2009 and ofcourse they blamed it on hardware, as a user i don’t care they should have backed up the users data, also their GUI is silly and their technology is very primitive, for example, I have 3 GB PST File, and carbonite does not support blocklevel, this is a must for online backup!!! i dont know how people are using carbonite!!!, each time I get an email carbonite takes the whole file, and again its soo slow, I did a benchmark for most of them, and going cloud means i need to access my data from anywhere any time, and as a business i need a real console application, which carbonite does not have, they have a billing web console, they call it Management!!!, Also I prefer Cloud Disater recovery to be included
I’m testing now Mozy and Timeline Cloud, and mostly will go with Timeline Cloud for 3 reasons, its faster than mozy, and does have real cloud disaster recovery and they use Amazon S3
Hope this will help

By: William Pritchard

William Pritchard — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:17:20 +0000

I bought a three year subscription to carbonite for “unlimited” backup on Feb. 1 2011. My 384GB of data have been uploading and spinning my disk constantly since then. As of this morning, June 13, I have 77GB of data to upload. At the present rate of 1GB per day upload speed it will be 77 more days before my photos are backed up. That is it will be 77 more days if I do not take any more 25MB photos. Since I have taken as many as 300 photos in a weekend, Carbonite will probably never catch up.

In no sense of the word is the carbonite backup “unlimited.”

By: TravisVS

TravisVS — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 03:21:22 +0000

@Marna:

Sorry to hear about your experience with Mozy. I guess the lesson here for everyone reading this is to check your backups on a regular basis. I have to admit I neglect to do this myself – until I read about horror stories like this. I just checked my backup with Carbonite and all my files are there. I also tried to restore a few files just as a test as well and everything was fine.

I think I will write a post about this next week as a reminder to people that you can’t just assume your backups are there. Stuff happens (for whatever reason) so you need to check them periodically.

Thanks for sharing your experience and hopefully you’ll find another provider you’ll be happy with.

TravisVS
Site Admin

By: Marna K

Marna K — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:45:27 +0000

Whatever you do, do NOT get Mozy for a backup service. Just this week I went to recover my files for two computers and everything was gone except the bookmarks for both computers! I had backed on their site for several years, and in recent months I had a lot of trouble trying to even sign into the site. I tried to get tech support but you have to have some tech number, I couldn’t get into the tech page to do anything. I even called the corporate office for help and got no reply! I filled out a problem form online, but they didn’t even get back to me right away. I even had trouble just trying to download my bookmarks, everything else was lost! I had even made recent backups, but according to the website they showed I hadn’t had any activity in about a year! I lost photos and research and things I wasn’t able to backup in another way, especially recently. BAD SERVICE do not use Mozy. I had originally had unlimited storage and I think when they changed the limit they wiped out all my files. I wasn’t close to the limit with my two computers.