The Carbonite Solution to Online Backups
Michael Arrington
89 comments »
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.
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 http://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 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 $3.40 a month for 20GB). And it works on Windows (XP and Vista), OS X and Linux.
The really nice thing about Jungle Disk is that you’re not actually interacting with anyone but Amazon - you’re not using some service provider, who is then using Amazon, you’re actually using S3 yourself. In addition, the author of Jungle Disk makes available GPL’d code that exposes the exact key format that it uses, which means that anyone is free to make a competing perfectly compatible product - so you’re not locked in to using Jungle Disk once you start using it. Anyone can develop software that reads and writes to a Jungle Disk-written account.
Daniel - yes I agree, I guess once they move out of beta they’ll charge for the software in some way.
Also, as it’s really just an online storage solution, you can use any existing backup tools / routine that you already use - for example rsync - just change the destination location.
The real perfect solution: http://rsync.net/.
I’m not sure why there’s still some Web 2.0 companies not going the open standards route.
Michael, you mentioned Carbonite offers encryption. Be careful — did you ask the big question: Is that just encryption over the wire, or does it also encrypt the data at rest (when it gets there)? HUGE difference!!
Graeme
is it another amazon S3 based service? I think that I do not need 7MM to start venture like that… with S3 I can do it with my pocket money and some programming.
Not knowing the company, the fact that they have a deal with Staples gives me some comfort level.
I will give them a try.
SERGE
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com
I agree rentalio, 7MM Wow !!, plus 5$/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
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?
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.
Let’s “do the math”: S3 (which is probably what Carbonite is using) charges $.20/GB storage and $.15/GB bandwidth. Since the client communicates directly to the S3 grid, they don’t have huge bandwidth issues in addition to worry about.
Now assume in the first month a client uploads 40GB of data. That costs Carbonite $6 of S3 storage fees and $8 of bandwidth for a cost of $14. Assuming the user never retrieves the data and never uploads any more in the succeeding months (and I will argue that’s an unreleastic assumption), the monthly cost is $6 but the monthly revenue is only $5.
Obviously, they are gambling, Las Vegas style, that many users will sign-up, pay $5/month, but only upload 5 or 10GB of data and that statistically spread across a large user base, they will break-even or make a profit.
Of course, what if that home user tries to backup their 1.5TB home NAS server over the course of several months?
Hmmm… I bet Carbonite invokes the “God clause” in their TOS and throws them off the service.
C’mon folks, this Web 2.0 free backup stuff is ridiculous — why would anyone trust important data to a service that is clearly on shaky financial ground - even if they succeed!
Silly Robert, S3 is for kids!
Lighten up, man, we don’t use S3 at Carbonite. We’re big boys & girls and we’ve got our own infrastructure and even write our own software! So, your financial model is a bit off the mark. Believe it or not, we did the math before we started the company, and fortunately, it looks quite different from yours
Has anyone had any experience with OmniDrive? I’ve been watching them and they are still in beta (haven’t had the chance to sign-up yet). they seems to be moving along well and have versions for MAC and PC. I like the fact that they consistently keep user (or those who want to know what’s going on) up-to-date on what they’re doing. I don’t see that with Mozy. Mozy posts a random “fun” tidbit but states nothing about improvements or where it’s headed… I find that a bit scary because it seems like they’ve got something good and are waiting to be bought… which may leave the end user, and his files, to the whim of the new company…
Give Backup To The Web a try. They’re $8.95 for 50GB, but you can have multiple computers on the same account, plus they have unlimited versioning, unlimited retention, and they back up only the changes. My outlook.pst is being backed up daily without shutting down, and I’m looking at 25 versions in my restore file, and that’s only for September! My outlook file is over 300MB, but each new download is only about 3MB. Backups are taking about 2 minutes (after the initial two days…) and I never notice that it’s running. I get an e-mail if I miss a backup (my computer was off).
i’m a carbonite user. i’ve read good and bad comments about it. but for any service offered at a good pricing level, you need to define your scope very precisely. use carbonite for backup, nothing more. no versioning, nothing. and accept the fact that restore will take days.
disaster strikes in 2 cases:
1) your pc crashed, you need to restore your data
2) your house burnt down, you need to access/restore your data
having a home NAS for backup solved problemo #1, but carbonite will give u an option when devil #2 strikes.
you can joke all you want, but it’s like insurance, if it does strike you …
as for data privacy, i’ve reviewed their faq, seemed to me that encryption at both netowork transport level and data bit level is at the top of their consideration. so it’s up to you to step out of the comfort zone and hand over your “privacy”. more or less, your profile is in the cyberworld already.
I sound too much like a carbonite employee, huh. well, i’m not. just an IT guy trying to help you make a decision that helps you in the long run.
Gio: XDrive sounds awesome from a feature standpoint, I don’t even care about the AOL connection, and even after trying and liking carbonite (my trial is up in a few days), I wouldn’t mind trying xdrive, except for 2 things:
1) Why can’t I just register without creating an AOL screen name? I don’t need or want yet another email address.
2) I can’t find pricing information on the xdrive site. All I see is promotion for the free 5GB. I tried Learn More, I tried the FAQ, I tried the Sign Up link, the terms, everywhere…. where is the pricing????
I think that all of these solutions are good for pc users however if businesses were thinking about backing up their data they should look towards more professional solutions, ones that at least have a phone number and address on the website!
These solutions are great for personal use and offer many great features that are valuable for people who just need a quick fix solution for backing up important data, however, if you are a business why on earth would you trust your personal and confidential information to a service which does not offer you their number for contact?
Just looking at the market for data backup as an outsider I would say the market is spilt into three parts right now. One for home users, one for business users and one for enterprise users. For home users I would say that services like Carbonite or even Mozy are good enough to suffice their means, but if you are a business looking to backup your critical information your data would be in safer hands with a trusted service backed by your trusted IT consultants.
I was referred to http://www.BackupReview.info while researching about Online Backup. I get all the Online backup and storage news from this site.
This website ranks the top 25 online backup companies monthly. I checked all rankings for 2006, surprisingly Carbonite has not made it to the top 25 even once. Can someone explain this please?
BackupReview.info is one of the best resource sites for online backup.
I absolutely love this service, but I guess I am a bit apprehensive that they will stay in business at the very attractive (for the customer at least) prices they offer.
I use Mozy & love the client. I don’t mind paying for it. I’ll probably be playing around with JungleDisk or something soon, though, since I also need something that will run on a server. I’m not terribly worried about losing my data — anything that super important is also backed up to DVDs.
Besides, the odds of Mozy going instantly out of business, not telling their users or letting them retrieve their files, and my PC blowing up at the same time…well, pretty slim odds.
I’m a digital photographer, I had a Raid 0 500 Gig crash in June. A service tried, to no avail, to retrieve my own personal artwork files. It was a real wake-up call. While I always backed up my customer files, it hurt to loose a couple of my projects.
I’ve since gone to using two Lacie external drives, and DVD’s being very inexpensive these days, I keep my backups at the local bank. I live next to the water, so, it’s important to do so.
In researching a better way, I found a couple of companies, including Acronis which I plan to use, who crate a complete (data, applications, setting etc.) mirror image of your hard drive, and what’s great, so they say, it can be installed on new or different computer. When restoring all of my files from my crash, the applications and the way I had tuned them took the most time.
Anyone used this as a backup solution?
Cheers, Jose
I agree Carbonite does the job for both the home user and anyone who needs their machine backed up.
I have it installed at home and on my work laptop, I’m always worried about losing my laptop and now I can be happy that all my work is backed up all the time.
How many users does Carbonite have? It’s interesting to me that those numbers aren’t published much within this niche. Before I decide to trust them, I’d like to know how many other people are trusting them.
Best online back up I’ve seen, is http://www.myotherdrive.com They give you 5GB free and a very slick browser client. Now they offer upgrades to storage amounts as large as 200GB. Cheapest rates I’ve seen thus far.
I recently subscribed to Carbonite and am now unable to get onto their website. I’ve checked my internet connection and firewall settings, both of which should be permitting access. This problem has just developed in the past couple of days–does anyone know whether Carbonite is experiencing problems? My data seems to be backing up still, but this obviously has implications for recovering it.
Has anyone had similar problems?
Annemarie: I’ve been having trouble with Carbonite the past few weeks as well. It’s taken 3 weeks to backup 5GB on a T1 and their support has not been terribly helpful.
Mike - Been a loyal TechCrunch reader since the beginning and have discovered some really cool services as a result of your reviews, but unfortunately this one seems to be a dud.
Anyone had sucess with any of the other online storage/backup services?
disclaimer: shameless plug.
Hey folks, part of the problem is you’re at a central provider. Given market pressures / pricing / growth, there are going to be issues now and again. It’s inevitable. Everyone goes down sooner or later. Everyone. (Well accept maybe Amazon’s S3. Has that gone down yet?)
Another consideration is this: How many hundreds of thousands of people backing up to a single provider does it take before it’s worth a hackers time to try and get in? Many of these providers while encrypting data locally, also have encryption keys locally too.
We’re one of the new players on the block, but with a twist: We’re a software only product that allows you to backup to as many destinations as you want. YOUR destinations. Simply install a USB drive at the office, a friends house, etc, and have your data off-site. (and on-site too.) This is a huge benefit when it comes time to restore. You don’t have to wait days or weeks to get it all back!
No monthly fees, just $20 to keep a copy of a machine on as many other machines as you want. You can backup to us if you want too, but we try and discourage that. Eventually we’ll go down, everybody does remember?
http://www.crashplan.com/support/faq.vtl#wecare
Try us out for 30 days free. As a central provider we’ll be faster than what I’m reading. Mozy looks pretty cool too if you want an off-site central provider. I haven’t read issues like this.
~Matthew
Hey, here is another one. With IDrive-E (http://www.idrive.com) you will get 2GB of backup space absolutely free. There is no catch involved here.
For $4.95 a month or $49.5/month, you can have unlimited backups. Just store your photos, media files or other important documents. This application does automated backup of your files and folders. There is no need to perform complicated procedures here to backup and restore your files. Just select the files and folders and then back them up immediately or schedule backups for a future date and time. You can even directly add files and folders from Windows Explorer to your IDrive-E backup set and easily drag-and-drop files using Windows Explorer like interface from your IDrive-E account to your PC. Users can view the list of all individual versions of a particular file that are maintained on the IDrive-E account and can restore individual versions of a file.
IDrive-E does incremental backups that transfer only portions of file that have been modified or changed since the last backup. You can also adjust the application bandwidth so that you can access other applications without any interruptions. All data transfer is encrypted with 128-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and there is 256-bit AES encryption on storage with user provided encryption password key.
Carbonite’s website is still using a price chart from Q1 2006:
“Prices based on public web sites 4/4/06″
Doesn’t exactly inspire me to trust them with my data.
For more backup alternatives:
http://www.seniorsguidetocomputers.com/backup.asp
Carbonite is now listed as number 11 in the top 25 rankings for February 2007 on the backupreview.info website.