# Carbonite



## ukbrown

can't remember who mentioned it or in which thread but I'm liking Carbonite as an offsite backup solution and as long as your file changes don't average more than 2GB per day, i think it works pretty well.

If you are UK based it's cheaper to buy it in Dollars, about half the price


----------



## clee01l

You're Welcome  I'm glad you like it. My wife pushed me in that direction when we realized the vulnerabilities of a home back-up scheme.


----------



## sizzlingbadger

Do you think Han Solo would be so keen on it   (sorry just had too)


----------



## ukbrown

clee.org not loading for me,


----------



## clee01l

[quote author=ukbrown link=topic=111'5.msg74766#msg74766 date=1285178385]
clee.org not loading for me,
[/quote]It is gone for good now now. I need to change my Sig.


----------



## ukbrown

I don't honestly know, what is best?, fastest, cheapest, most secure.

It had some good reviews.
The trial worked
It was easy to use
Someone else on these forums found it was OK as well.

On this basis I purchased.


----------



## clee01l

I'm probably the 'Other' person using Carbonite from this forum. For less than $6'/yr. I thinik it is a great deal for unlimited storage. I've been using Carbonite since early summer. Currently I have 36K files backed up with Carbonite and ~8'GB of data Each file that is backed up can contain multiple versions. 
Since subscribing to Carbonite, I have not needed a full restore, but I have done a test on restoring a folder or two as well as recovering one or two individual files.


----------



## JohnnieR

There are actually several people (on-air personalities such as talk show hosts) promoting this who have 'offer codes', which you can use to get a couple months of free service with Carbonite.  Seems to have a good reputation.


----------



## Brad Snyder

JohnnieR, welcome to the forums.

If you know any of the offer codes, I don't think it would be unethical to share them. If they're announced over the air, with the intent of drumming up new customers, I think Carbonite would appreciate the free sales leads.


----------



## edgley

I have started to use Crashplan. Not only a bit cheaper, but doesn't throttle speeds; bit of a plus when you have over 250GB to upload.
Its sits here all day streaming up at 700kbps average.


----------



## wblink

clee01l said:


> I'm probably the 'Other' person using Carbonite from this forum. For less than $6'/yr. I thinik it is a great deal for unlimited storage. I've been using Carbonite since early summer. Currently I have 36K files backed up with Carbonite and ~8'GB of data Each file that is backed up can contain multiple versions.
> Since subscribing to Carbonite, I have not needed a full restore, but I have done a test on restoring a folder or two as well as recovering one or two individual files.


 
Did you restore from Carbonite or from another source?
Why am I asking: restoring from a different source than Carbonite drove Carbonite mad and unusable. I am using DropBox now, it's another approach.


----------



## canon

I love carbonite and have been using it for over a year. It's so heavily promoted in the USA, i'm surprised it's not as publicised in the UK.


----------



## cborgrx

I can't decide between Carbonite and just doing my own backup on something like WD's Mybook. Anybody else?


----------



## clee01l

cborgrx said:


> I can't decide between Carbonite and just doing my own backup on something like WD's Mybook. Anybody else?


I do both.  Carbonite for the secure OFF-Site protection. And my own scheduled BU software to provide redundancy for my critical data.  Carbonite does not back up removable drives or Network attached drives. Many people here keep their master images on a non local or removable drive. Carbonite does not help in this case.


----------



## bbrown31274

I've had a free trial for carbonite on my laptop, is it really worth paying for the service? I don't need to backup my whole hard drive, just the really important files I need. I have external drive and DVD storage. 

Thanks!


----------



## Jim Wilde

Hi, welcome to the forum.

"..is it really worth paying for the service?".....to be honest you're the only person who can really answer that. The strength of Carbonite and others of the same ilk is that it is an *off-site* backup solution (and I believe it has other strengths such as versioning). Personally, I think anyone who takes their photography seriously (hobbyist or pro) is taking an unnecessary risk if their backup strategy does not include an off-site element, although there are many ways of achieving that - Carbonite being one.

So, in order to answer your own question you need to weigh up your attitude to risk so that you can decide if you want/need an off-site backup capability. If you do, then you need to look at the alternative methods of achieving that versus the costs involved.....at that point you may or may not decide that Carbonite is the answer.

BTW, I do not use Carbonite, I use a manual system for off-site backups (involves a cycle of portable hard drives stored at my Mother-in-Laws apartment!) though I expect I will look again at Carbonite if my ISP ever delivers on its promise to dramitically improve my broadband speed. As my 'system' is based on a weekly cycle I do understand that I could lose up to a weeks worth of updates should my house burn down, though in that eventuality such a loss would be the least of my worries! 

Hope this helps.


----------



## pdxrjt

I tried Carbonite trial, but it was so slow I decided not to use it.  In addition to photos, many of them in RAW format, I write music and have numerous songs.....as I record them myself, each song can have 8-18-28 tracks..... of .wav files.  After 3 days about 2 percent of my material was on Carbonite.   To backup, I currently take removable drives to my mother's house..... but I'm looking into a waterproof/fireproof safe which can be bolted to the wall (they are surprisingly cheap.)


----------



## MonicaL

If you run Norton 360 A/V on your PC, it comes with a 4GB backup allowance on their server that you can back up to.  I have mine set for daily.  You can purchase extra storage but it isn't cheap.


----------



## gregDT

You can now buy 1TB external drives for the price of a years subscription to Carbonite. I currently have four 1TB drives. Two at home and two stored off site. I rotate the third drive at each site weekly and upload anything crucial that I need to protect until a drive rotation (clients work) to an Amazon S3 bucket for which I pay nothing as it's my first year. I cringe at the thought of actually having to upload 2Tb to a cloud storage service. I think when you get past a certain level of storage requirement off site storage becomes a real issue unless you have corporate sized bandwidth.


----------



## pdxrjt

gregDT.... that's my thinking.  I have an attached, non- removable external drive and a swappable drive.  I use 3 back-ups in the swappable, one in the drive, one in my home safe and one stored off-site.  I think it is the way to go.


----------



## edgley

Personally I cringe at the thought of having to remember to swap and move disks around.
My 250GB to crashplan took 30 days to upload.


----------



## janner

I have had Carbonite for a couple of years and I am quite satisfied with it. I speak (write?) as someone who had a total hard disk failure about one year ago.
I had a lot of stuff on my hard drive but I am pleased to say I got it all back. It took a while but there was a lot there!
Sure, it takes a while initially, depending on what you have on your computer but I just set it up and forget it and it runs automatically in the background.
If it is causing any problems on the odd occasion when I am doing something which takes a lot of RAM, I just stop Carbonite.
I also have external hard drives but that is my comfort zone.


----------



## pdxrjt

Janner, When you say it that a while initially.....I started to download as part of a trial.  I let my machine run for 3 days-24hours per.  At the end of that time, 2% of what I wanted to download was done.  This means (if my math is correct) about 150 days to make an initial download of my material without updates.  I have a modest photo collection of about 18,000 (many raw) and a hard drive full of WAV files (samples, loops and my own music.)  So, was I doing something wrong?  How long did it take "initially?"


----------



## clee01l

pdxrjt said:


> ...g?  How long did it take "initially?"


IIRC my initial Download of about 70GB took a little over the initial two week trial period.  You also need to realize that you can specify which folders to backup and that active files that have been backed up might get backed-up two or three times  before all your selected files get backed up. Also if you are in the habit of turning off your computer when "You" are not using it, Carbonite will not be working when it could sense idle cycles and be most active.  Carbonite works as a low priority background task and defers to foreground tasks.  Also I recall that Carbonite dod not back up my Outlook.pst file until near the end of my first two weeks. This was primarily because Outlook.pst is always open and active.


----------



## Victoria Bampton

It'll also depend on your upload speed - some internet connections offer faster upload than others.


----------



## edgley

You can boost the setting of Carbonite to remove all the restrictions. The problem is that they throttle the speeds too; that was one of the major reasons I went with another company.


----------



## pdxrjt

I am not sure of the upload speed, but the download is over 15 Mpbs.  I did specify what I wanted it to back up and left the computer on 24 hrs a day for the 3 days I was doing the trial.  It seemed that, whatever the reason, 150 days was a bit long to back up the contents of choice.


----------

