We’ve been tracking online storage for nearly a year, and for good reason. As the PC becomes the center of our digital lives, having backups of email, photos, videos and music becomes increasingly important. Solutions like Foldershare and USB hard drives help with the problem, but what consumers really need is a dead simple service that backs up your entire hard drive to the Internet regularly.
Boston based Carbonite is the closest to perfection we’ve seen so far. It requires a simple installation, and users choose to back up their entire hard drive or just parts of it. Carbonite then begins the backup process, uploading 2 GB per day over broadband until finished. Files are encrypted, and there is no limit on total storage. If you delete a file, Carbonite keeps it stored for 30 days in case you change your mind. Carbonite monitors files that are changed and backs them up right away.
And if you have a problem and need to get the data downloaded to a reformatted hard drive or new computer, Carbonite will download at up to 15GB per day over broadband until your system is restored.
Carbonite says that one in eight computers have some sort of data failure. The number one reason is user error, although crashes, fires, floods, theft and viruses all play a part as well. The 30 day cache solves the user-error problem and the fact that data is stored on the Internet solves the fire/flood/theft issue (where USB or network drives may also be affected).
Carbonite has a free 15 day trial (with no credit card required). The service costs $5 per month, with discounts if you pre-pay for a year or two.
The next best solution we’ve found is Mozy, which has a 60GB limit on total storage and costs $5 per month for 30 GB of storage or $10 per month for 60GB. The fact that Carbonite has no limit on total storage makes it significantly more attractive than Mozy.
The downside? It only works on Windows PCs (as does Mozy). Mac users are out of luck for now.
It’s clear that Google is thinking along the same lines with Platypus, their online storage solution. There are fewer details on Microsoft Live Drive, but we can expect a compelling offering from them as well. The holy grail for these services is to be built into PCs and offered to users out of the box. It’s a natural revenue stream for Dell, HP, etc., and they could either build it themselves of partner with a company like Carbonite.
Carbonite has received $7 million in venture capital. Until May 2006 they were focused on photo storage, and launched the current service in May.
Interesting Carbnite Tour guide. $5 a month for 1GB. Any one has try how fast the upload and download speed?
Finally, a Web 2.0 company name I can get behind. Well done!
FYI AOL’s Xdrive is now offering a free 5GB of storage.
Whatever services come out, Live Drive, GDrive, etc, make sure you use something like TrueCrypt – http://www.truecrypt.org to keep your data safe. I don’t care how much they say they encrypt your data… you just never know.
what about http://www.podbi.com. i use them for almost two years and they work quite well…
Using the following link to Mozy, you get 256 MB extra space for free when signing up.
https://mozy.com/?ref=N6TGKG
I also really recommend Carbonite, in fact I use both Carbonite and Mozy, just in case.
#1 above – it isn’t $5/month/GB. It’s $5/month for unlimited storage.
Been using this service with a package i got from PlumChoice Online PC services(24.95 a month included my av and spyware protrection..oh and unlimited remote support). Upload speeds are ok…not gonna lie and say it blazes but it does the job. Is wicked easy to use so far!
#6 above
am I reading their chart wrong?
“From price comparison chart” on their website, it didnot show unlimited strorage. It show 1GB for $5/month
#1 & #8 above
did you notice how much 5GB, 10GB, 20GB & 40GB storage costs?
ok, repeat after me: i didn’t learn how to read a chart…
Re 10, Carbonite uploaded as fast my DSL goes. There isn’t any physical way to get the data up there any faster. Read the specs on your DSL service and do the math. Doesn’t matter if it’s xDrive, Carbonite, or whoever. BTW I didn’t experience any bugs — pretty slick, in fact.
Sounds nice but what about the bandwidth costs for normal users. Uploading 2GB/day is way over the limit provided by most ISPs.
not sure how you are going to get around that with any service Anshul.
I use Carbonite on my home and work systems (solo consultant) and it’s great. Their support team got back with me in less than a few hours for the two set-up questions I had.
One thing to keep in mind for those of you who use Outlook: your entire OST/PST file changes each time you open Outlook. I do not think the file gets backed up while open so make sure you close Outlook daily and give Carbonite time to back up the ost/pst file.
Customer support in 2006 may have been great, but its horrible now. My Carbonite stopped backing up over a week ago. So far, I have 3 unanswered emails(other than the auto response that says it may take up to 72 hours to get a response) and I’ve called twice. The first time they left me waiting on hold for 25 minutes and the suggestions made did not resolve the problem. I’m on my second call now, and as I type this I’ve been waiting for their support staff for 1 hour, 28 minutes. This is ridiculous. The automated, pre-recorded voice that comes on the line keeps suggesting I purchase the “upgraded” support package in order to get priority customer service for an additional $19.95/year. I’m beginning to feel like this is a marketing tactic to drive me just crazy enough to pull out my credit card so I can get this mess taken care of in a timely fashion.
Who has more than an hour and a half to waste on hold during a work day? Good grief. I will no longer be touting the awesomeness of Carbonite to friends and colleagues. What a shame. They offer a great service until something goes wrong. Customer service?? Not really.
Allison:
Did you get an answer to your problem? I have had the exact same issue and no luck getting a fix.
MAC and Allison, if either of you are still having trouble, please send a note to customersupport@carbonite.com with ATTN: Len in the subject line and I’ll personally make sure you receive a quick response. I apologize for the frustration you’ve experienced.
Sincerely,
Len Pallazola
Manager, Customer Service Systems
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com
Wow The trouble Allison reports is very disturbing but will make for some active blog on the local tech talk lines in silicon valley
I thought carbonite was the answer to many costly system solutions
like buying a zip drive and or looking to whitecloud or firewire
for integrity answers to back up insure personal entire system data
and software restore problems Sorry Allison and other reporting here
after this article had to be the gynny pigs and they even paid this carbonite group only to find they had to have some retroactive
email after they had problems and paid this service to find out
what kind of service they got into. Id never put my system into the hands of carbonite never ever because of the facts Allison states she had to beg for hours online phoning these clowns and the worst of it she paid for this service. Thats the kicker she was paying for service and
reactionary email is not a way to get help when your sysem is down and you expected assured system full restore, My question to carbonite
how is a person thats off the network down supposed to read after the
fact emails they send reactionary to the poor customer thats down off net expecting their carbonite restore to fulfill a fix automatically.
They would never even know the customer service guy sent a email to try and offer help first off cause their network system is down. The second problem is knowing the service guy was savvy to have sent a email retroactive to fix the problem. I would never put my systems software and data in jeopardy with carbonite now knowing how they
worked their services with Allison and MAC. Man the silicon valley tech talk is gonna buzz a bit today. They missspent their million dollar venture I thought I heard the worst when the hackers launched trojans and spawned worms on the network. The real sticker of this is the fact they paid for this type reactionary service and then spent hours in trying to correct the issues and got the privilege to pay for this type service.
I would not commit my hard earned green for that. Nor should anyone else. Just a comment from a previous operations helpdesk lead. been there and I know my service desks would have monitored the failure
and been the ones on the phone notifying the customer prior to them
having to having to go through such trials and frustrations The fact they had initiated a trigger download of this carbonite should have been a trigger
in carbonites scripting for a customer service call back to the troubled
caller so they could fully assist right on the spot a full restore without
the customer spinning and having to alert the public venting on tech articles about the fiasco. Yikes the bloggers in silicon valley are gonna
buzz this one. Okay carbonite. Techcrunch thanks
Wow, Jay, is English a second language for you? If it isn’t, you need to go back to school. Your response is so poorly written and punctuated that I can barely follow what you are saying.
I’m not sure most ISP’s impose upload bandwith limits (?). I’m using Comcast, and backup up about 6G to Mozy. The first time it took days, but that’s not because of a daily quota but the limits of the upload pipe (300+ kbps), and the fact that Mozy throttles back when I use the PC.
Incremental backups are really small, it copies only the changes, not entire files, which is really important e.g. with a huge Outlook.pst file.
This is an amazing coincidence, Bill and I posted #13 and #14 almost at the same time… but #14 answers the problem brough up in #13:-)
Previous releases of Mozy would have backed up my entire 160MB Outlook file just because I received on email or added a contact; now it only copies a few K of the change, and can back up the locked file as well (i.e. I don’t have to quit Outlook)
I’ve been using carbonite for a few weeks now and found some bugs.
1. It will run even if NO users are logged into windows. (Waiting at login screen the software will be running!)
2. After a MS update and restart carbonite re-set it’s entire config file and started backing up EVERYTHING on my PC it thought it should backup. (Even though when I initially installed it I chose to choose what to backup, and that had been the case and working fine for over a week!)
So after having to go through my carbonite through My Computer and delete EVERYTHING and re-do the initial backup… I’m happy with how the software works etc but VERY upset it re-did it’s config and backed up files I DID NOT want backed up.
I have contacted Carbonite’s support in hopes of answers.
Streamload has a service they call MediaMax. #5/month gets you 100GB of storage and 10GB of downloads. You can download a client app, use their web front end for uploads, or use FTP. I recently moved up from their free plan (25GB) to the $5/month plan. Pretty happy so far. But the biggest problem is uploaded 100 GB worth of data. Beats Mozys plans.
That being said, the MediaMax client is slow, still in beta. The Mozy client is excellent.
I’ve been using Carbonite for about a month. I tried the 15 day free service and it was great. So I signed up.
It did take about a week to backup 18GB. Once the initial backup is done you really don’t notice it. But it’s nice to know I have it.
Beware the fine print – don’t trust anything important to them. In the terms of service, they explain the “bait and switch – they state they can change anything anytime. So “unlimited storage” and “$5/month” can change whenever they feel like it:
“Carbonite may change the Terms of Use at any time, without notice to you”
And of course, “unlimited” is 100% BS. It really means “until our storage costs get too high and then we simply invoke this clause:
“Users who are deemed to be ‘abusers’, in Carbonite’s sole discretion, …Carbonite reserves the right to terminate or suspend such accounts without prior notice”
Since they don’t define what is abuse, they can, at any time, decide that storing that 100GB you managed to upload is “abuse”, close your account, and purge your data.
C’mon – everybody knows storage only costs 15cents per Gig for these guys, they need to be honest about it.
(All these guys are just front-ends to Amazon S3 storage)
I agree with Robert S definition of how they have failed in their venture knowing the average system user is benign to the background workings of networks and market supply vs demand the $$dollar cost Robert
describes are valid and are further proof this carbonite will not be a very good personal solution until they outline and upfront disclose the facts behind the market and really define a solution that does a better job thats seemlessly answers data integrity and full system retoration with
detailed billing outlines as to scope when in the market to sell to the public. There are a few out here able to do consumer report damage control and with carbonite its open for some further infrastructure
improvements ask Allison and MAC they know and paid for the privilege.
Thanks Robert for your spot on insight.
Attention Carbonite customer service .
i had nothing but slow and unfinished problems with carbonite. so i tried XDrive and found its UI equally frustrating. So I’m off to Omnidrive while i wait for google or yahoo or apple with the new Dot Mac to come up with something that is not only Web 2.1 but actually works
There a few promotions at Carbonite’s website.
1) Default 15-day PCBackup promotion.
2) Radio promo for 3 months. (located top-right of the homepage)
3) Staples 6-month PhotoBackup promotion. (look for the Staples logo)
I suggest signing up for the 3-month radio promo since the PhotoBackup only backs up… photos.
#19 – what have you signed up for that doesn’t have these words almost verbadum? Any email, web site hosting.. you name it. They’re just watching their backs.
Noone seems to have mentioned that with Mozy you get 2GB absolutely free…ok it’s not comparable to 30GB or 60GB but it’s a good start. So far, incidentally, I’ve had no problems with it and found no catches.
How about 25 GB free storage? More here
Mac users will have the option (if they upgrade or buy a new mac next spring) of timemachine … of course that doesn’t solve the issue of “error, although crashes, fires, floods, theft and viruses” as you say, but if Apple provides online encrypted storage space through some iYouNameIt service, I think a great majority of apple users would at least give it a try. So, I’m not surprised at all most of these solutions are geared towards windows users.
I’m using free mozy and it’s brilliant. My terabytes of flac files don’t need backing up, only my documents. That fits nicely withing 2GB.
I’ve been using Mozy for about ten months now and have not had any problems at all. Will I switch to Carbonite? Don’t know. The unlimited backup is a nice feature. But Mozy’s interface is so nice and logical and unobtrusive that it’s hard to switch.
My hope is that Mozy will soon launch a competing plan that offers unlimited storage space for a set price, just like Carbonite (Mozy guys: take note!!).
Carbonite sounds cool – but it’s single platform, so can’t be used on OSX and Linux boxes.
Best online storage solution I’ve found is Jungle Disk – http://www.jungledisk.com. Uses Amazon S3, and works transparently – you just treat it as a network drive (you can map a drive letter to it, and the pricing is consistent with Amazon S3 pricing – approx $3.40 a month for 20GB). And it works on Windows (XP and Vista), OS X and Linux.
The really nice thing about Jungle Disk is that you’re not actually interacting with anyone but Amazon – you’re not using some service provider, who is then using Amazon, you’re actually using S3 yourself. In addition, the author of Jungle Disk makes available GPL’d code that exposes the exact key format that it uses, which means that anyone is free to make a competing perfectly compatible product – so you’re not locked in to using Jungle Disk once you start using it. Anyone can develop software that reads and writes to a Jungle Disk-written account.
Daniel – yes I agree, I guess once they move out of beta they’ll charge for the software in some way.
Also, as it’s really just an online storage solution, you can use any existing backup tools / routine that you already use – for example rsync – just change the destination location.
The real perfect solution: http://rsync.net/.
I’m not sure why there’s still some Web 2.0 companies not going the open standards route.
Michael, you mentioned Carbonite offers encryption. Be careful — did you ask the big question: Is that just encryption over the wire, or does it also encrypt the data at rest (when it gets there)? HUGE difference!!
Graeme
is it another amazon S3 based service? I think that I do not need 7MM to start venture like that… with S3 I can do it with my pocket money and some programming.
Not knowing the company, the fact that they have a deal with Staples gives me some comfort level.
I will give them a try.
SERGE
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.serg...heconcierge.com
I agree rentalio, 7MM Wow !!, plus 5$/month, plus bandwidth from ISP.
The cost of hard drives is continuing to fall, If you see what I mean
Mozy is cool, but I don’t trust them exactly because they are free.
Perhaps I’m paranoid but it’s my data, and I don’t want it to fall into the enemy’s hands.
There’s another solution to the online backup problem: buy cheap web hosting, and use a program which can FTP your backups to your hosting.
For example 1and1 offers 5 GB of storage for 2.24 $ per month, DreamHost offers the 20 GB of storage for 8 $ per month, etc.
If you are a techie, you can easily write a batch file which runs a compression utility which backs up your data, encrypts it with password (WinRAR, for example, supports the AES encryption algorithm, and you can always call the command-line version of GnuPG or PGP), and then FTPs it to your hosting account, in a hidden directory (so accidental web surfers don’t see it – and even if somehow they happen to see it, it’s heavily encrypted).
Using this solution, at least the encryption is handled on your machine, using powerful standard encryption algorithms. You don’t have to trust a program such as Carbonite or Mozy.
Out of curiosity, I have just installed DriverMax.
The program is quite strange. If you double-click on the tray open, it opens the main window of the program. It doesn’t look like all other Windows applications. Instead, the app is made using the Internet Explorer ActiveX control. If you right click in the main window, you’ll notice that the IE right click menu appears.
In the main application (which looks totally unlike other Windows apps) I couldn’t find a way to select which files to back up. This is strange since that’s where I expected this to be.
Instead, you have to use Windows Explorer (if you use something else, such as Total Commander like many power users do, you’re out of luck), right click on a folder, and choose “Carbonite Secure Backup” and then choose “Backup this folder”.
Advice: if you use the Carbonite backup, make sure you take the tour they propose first. The application works in a way totally different from other Windows applications, and even if you’re a power user, you have to take the tour to understand how it works. The tour only takes 5 minutes.
For the Carbonite team, I have the following advice: Please add, in the main Carbonite app, a way of seeing all the locations (folders) that are backed up, and allow us to Add/Remove locations.
Also, please specify somewhere in the app what kind of encryption you use. I would be more comfortable with it if the app sported an “AES” or “RSA” logo on it’s main window.
How can they reconcile 2GB/day uploading with individual files that are larger than that? I have a couple of email archives that top 2GB (Delete key? What delete key?) and every back-up solution I’ve seen needs to recopy the entire PST file every time there’s a single change.
Oops… misread. It’s 15GB per day. Sorry.
Given all the confusion in the comments above about their pricing structure, they should probably change their pricing chart to use a single TR/TD block to display $5 across the entire row.
And we all know how tech savvy TC readers are. Just imagine the laypeople.
the best online file storages by far are:
1. Esnips.com
2. Box.net
3. Drivehq.com
4. Orbitfiles.com
the rest are way toooooooooooo rigid, lots of limitations
Well, I’ll admit I’m biased because I’m the General Manager of Xdrive.
But I really think you guys should check out Xdrive more. http://www.xdrive.com
A lot of these other services being discussed, including Carbonite, are just BACKUP services. And, if all you are interested in is backing up your data, I suppose they work fine. But most of them require you to download and install client software.
Xdrive is much more – it’s an online drive service. It’s like always having a network drive available, so you can get to your data and your files from anywhere using only a browser. There’s no client software required to use the service.
However, if you do download our Xdrive software, then you can actually mount the online storage as a real drive in Windows and drag and drop files to it and use it as if it were live storage on your computer. You can open and edit files directly from your “X:” drive. You can even upload your music to Xdrive and then stream it to yourself on any computer.
And you can’t really beat our pricing — 5GB for free. Period. Without any limitation on bandwith utilization. (Most of the other services out there which say they are free, including Streamload and AMD Live all put some limits on how much you can upload or download. But, Xdrive has NO limits on usage!)
You can also use Xdrive to share files — any of your files or folders you put on Xdrive can then be shared with your friends. And there’s no file-size limit on sharing. So, Xdrive is really a much better solution for sharing large files than email, where even the best email services limit you to 16MB or so. I use the service myself to share huge folders of photos and videos with my family. These are things I wanted to share privately, not by creating a public website — so Xdrive was perfect for this.
And of course, Xdrive does have a full-featured backup functionality available too. So, even if BACKUP is all you care about, Xdrive will work well as your solution. But if you really want to take advantage of all the other things you can do with your files online, then Xdrive is really the way to go.
I haven’t found any other service that offers ALL of the above stuff — let alone any other service that is FREE !! Come, try it out. http://www.xdrive.com.
Gio Hunt
General Manager
Xdrive, LLC
Gio, I know I am reading this a while after you have posted it. You made a good enough argument for me to check out your website. Too bad you’ve gone out of business.
XDrive is a service of AOL? Just being honest, that’s going to make a lot of users look right past it.
Gio – your pricing is getting better but is still at the bottom of the pile.
you guys using have fun – there’s no way in hell I’m trusting my online backups to another web 2.0 company offering stuff for free that it should charge for. lots of luck when they fold under the competition.
And Gio, I’ll agree with Bill, the whole connection with AOL is big no-no right now. Not sure if I’m ready to risk having my data strewn across the internet for everyone to check out.
weblife.earthlink.net for life!
you guys using mozy have fun – there’s no way in hell I’m trusting my online backups to another web 2.0 company offering stuff for free that it should charge for. lots of luck when they fold under the competition.
And Gio, I’ll agree with Bill, the whole connection with AOL is big no-no right now. Not sure if I’m ready to risk having my data strewn across the internet for everyone to check out.
weblife.earthlink.net for life!
This sounds like a good idea but it would be interesting to see the speed of the upload. That to me would possibly be key because the pricing looks alright.
It seems to me the best backup solution is one in which the user is completely in control of without having to pay monthly fees and trusting of their data to a 3rd party. Go out and buy yourself a Linksys NSLU2, Maxtor Fusion, or similar NAS and have complete control over a faster, cheaper (long run) backup system.
The fact that it could take many days (@ 15GB/day download) to completely restore from a catastrophic failure using an online backup service (Carbonite in this case) is completely absurd to me. Who has the time to wait that long to get back all their data?
The main point of remote backup storage is disaster protection — fire, flood, tornado, break-in, office raid by the FBI or IRS, etc. If your backup solution is in the same location as your primary data, it isn’t much of a backup. What many people don’t know about the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City is that the larger companies had their data stored on servers half a continent away. Though the loss of life was tragic, the companies survived, because their data survived.
I’ve just signed up for the free trial, but http://www.sparebackup.com lloks pretty good. It is for Windows, you do have to download software, it has a soft limit of 100G (they don’t want commerical resale, so if your backing up more than that, they reserve the right to check you out and maybe shut you down). It costs $60/year for up to 50G.
It sounded pretty good to me. I’ll give it a try and get back to you…
Oh, I forgot. One of the things I like about Spare Backup is that it backs up to 2 physically separate locations, so even a catastrophic failure at one data center’s locale wouldn’t blow away your data.
I am a current carbonite subscriber aand according to my records my subscription jnfo, it expires 1/18/2009. will I be getting a renewal bill. Please advise.
Alfred Blumenkamp