Carbonite Online Backup

I’ve been trying Carbonite online backup. [Update: Buyer beware: A number of users in the comments section below report difficulty restoring their data and in contacting customer service. ]

It’s an appealing value proposition attractively priced– $5/month for “unlimited” backup of all of the documents on your PC, or $50 for a year if you pepay.

So far so good; it’s been very easy to set up and immensely reassuring to have automatic offsite backup.

With a price that low there are naturally a couple caveats to the “unlimited” backup offer.

The terms of use have clauses to prevent “abuse” which could either be very concerning or a non-issue depending on how aggressively they are enforced. “YOU WILL BE IN VIOLATION OF THIS POLICY IF, WITHIN ANY MONTH, YOUR USAGE GREATLY EXCEEDS MORE THAN THE AVERAGE LEVEL OF MONTHLY USAGE OF CARBONITE’S PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMERS GENERALLY.” The definition of “greatly exceeds” is entirely up to Carbonite. If enforced overly aggressively, someone who simply takes lots of digital photos could easily exceed the average monthly level.

The other caveat is that Carbonite, by design, does not make it easy to restore particular files to a PC other than the original one. You can easily restore particular files to the host PC, but for other PCs you can only easily restore the entire backup. Carbonite wants to be in the backup business, not the file synchronization business, which could lead to much greater ongoing bandwidth usage for a particular user.

If the Carbonite team is listening, I have two suggestions:

* I would happily pay an additonal fee based on bandwidth used to be able to access particular documents remotely on an on-demand basis.

* It would be very useful to be able to see and search the list of folders and filenames that have been backed up through the web site interface. This would provide additional reassurance that the backup has in fact worked.

Update: The comments below from Mike Abrams have some interesting info on how Carbonite handles users with large backup sets. If the size of your backup is more than 50GB, the backup rate is throttled down to 500MB per day. It will complete eventually, but very slowly.

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Hmmm. This sounds terrific, but what do you want to bet that 250GB of digital photos does, in fact, “greatly exceed” the “average level” of usage for paying users?

Yes, I don’t like that uncertainty.

Carbonite seems to suggest that they’ll offer the alternative expensive plans for higher volume users (which of course defeats the whole “all you can eat” premise.)

They also suggest that 40-50GB seems to be their idea of what the typical user will back up. (Actually, that’s about what the size of my backup will be if I don’t include MP3s.)

I expect in the early days Carbonite won’t make an issue of it, but when it comes to proving profitability things will tighten up.

Hi Phil, thanks for the writeup.

The idea behind Carbonite Online PC Backup is to make online backup cheap and very easy to use for the average PC user. Think about the family member who uses a PC regularly but calls you every so often for impromptu tech support — Carbonite’s business is based around making regular backups easy for that computer user.

The “all you can eat” plan is there to make our service easy to understand for people who aren’t technically savvy. (e.g., one subscription backs up one PC — you don’t have to know how many GB you have or worry that we’re going to jack up the price on you if you go from 20 to 21GB)

The average PC user doesn’t have 100s of GB of data, and most will probably never go north of a few dozen GB.

All discussions of our profitability aside, it’s just not practical to back up 250GB using the current version of Carbonite. You’d probably get frustrated waiting for a backup that size to complete over your asymetrical home Internet connection. (A typical home high-speed connection backs up a maximum of 2-3GB per day, so backing up 250GB would take months)

Of course, as you point out Phil, even if you have 100s of GB, you can still use the current version of Carbonite to keep an offsite, up-to-date backup of your most critical 40-50GB of data. You’ll still be getting a phenomenal deal compared to the alternatives. (Look at the pricing chart on our homepage.)

Oh, and if you’re looking for a list of the files you’ve backed up with Carbonite, go to your My Computer folder and click on the Carbonite Secure Backup drive. You’ll see the status of all the files in your backup, organized according to your file structure.

If you’ve got more questions about Carbonite, check out our FAQs:
Basic FAQs: http://www.carbonite.com/faqs.aspx
Tech FAQs: http://www.carbonite.com/faqs_tech.aspx

And if you haven’t done so already, you should try the free 15-day trial (no credit card required):
https://site1.carbonite.com/manage/signup.aspx

You can try Carbonite free on multiple computers if you’d like — just please use the same email address to download each free trial so that you can easily manage them all under one account.

Thanks guys,
Jessica from Carbonite

I appreciate that Carbonite is getting out there and talking about this issue. I found this blog post:
http://www.nickstarr.com/2006/06/29/carbonite-when-unlimited-is-limited/
written by one of the guys who got bitten by this. I’m just not sure how you can pass off unlimited as unlimited unless it actually IS unlimited. Sure it sucks when someone wants to upload 100GB to your servers, but like you said, that’s by far the minority. Isn’t it better to let those few use a service that works as billed (”unlimited”) and avoid the bad PR at the cost of a few extra gigs of space?

Damn, i thought i’d found an ideal place for all my backups. Still, $5 a month aint bad for offsite storage of all your docs and photos, and you can set it and forget it until your hard disk implodes :s

One thing we do which is helpful and you can see if you host offers is a seed load utility. For our customers with over 25 GB of data we simply send a 100GB USB drive and have them load their backup data (encrypted of course) and send in a prepaid box to our data center. We then load the data on the server and from that point its just incremental. Finished with near to 100GB of data in 48 hrs.

www.disksave.com

I have been unable to connect to the Carbonite server for 3 days. Tech support has failed to respond to my email. I thought it might be my Zone Alarm firewall, but even with it turned off, I still cannot connect to their server to resume backing up. I already paid for a 1-year subscription so they are in no rush to resolve my problem.

I have been using Carbonite since 2/9/07. When the backup began it was determined that my backup size was ~150GB. If Carbonite knows that in advance how can they consider it abusive? So far I have backed up 135,000 files totaling 44GB. Carbonite is smart enough to send the small files first, so that most of my day to day stuff is protected right away. The music and video take much longer, but am I willing to wait 6 months? Sure - I’ve gone a year without being able to do a decent backup. If they do not really allow unlimited backup . . . there will be a lot of kicking and screaming. 50 GB doesn’t even begin to cover my needs, and is not worth the bother.

Got Carbonite in March. Yesterday a stupid mistake wiped out all of business files. I have tried to “restore” for the past ten hours but Carbonite is not open for business. What a fraud!!!

Yesterday, in great frustration, I labeled Carbonite a “fraud”. Ooops. They responded and tried their best to help me get into their web site but it turned out that MY TurboTAx program was jamming my access to Carbonite. Now that I have removed the TurboTAx and gotten in, Carbonite has restored most (if not all) of my lost files. Thanks, Carbonite Guys, you are the real-deal.

I’ve tried several online backup services, incl. Carbonite, DriveHQ, iBackup, XDrive and Box.net
At the first glance, Carbonite seems to be a good solution for remote backup. Then I tried it for a week, and found lots of issues. Sorry this might sound harsh to the folks at Carbonite, I am speaking from an IT consultant point of view, not from home users. Certain concepts of Carbonite online backup is good, as Jessica said “to make online backup cheap and very easy to use for the average PC user”. but this purpose is also a defeat to the real needs of online backup. A few major flaws of Carbonite include: the GUI looks too amateur, serious users won’t even consider it; the application features are too thin, which is appealing to home/junior users, but is overly weak from an IT professional’s point of view. It lacks features that let you schedule it, create multiple backup tasks, store multiple file versions, access files remotely from any PC, etc. In testing the service, the backup simply takes forever and there is little control. my conclusion is you simply cannot have a one-size-fit-all online backup solution. If you do, you might generate a lot of press, but business-wise, Carbonite probably cannot make a viable business with this offering — too low end, suitable only for home users, and consumers are notorious for not paying for any online services.

So my conclusion, companies like Carbonite (and Box.net) are too low-end. It might be good for casual users. But for serious online backup, I will recommend go with DriveHQ (http://www.drivehq.com) or iBackup (http://www.ibackup.com), both companies offer more powerful backup software and a lot more features on the web. XDrive was ok, but the service has degraded over the past few years and being an AOL company only makes it worse.

Signed up for Carbnite yesterday and now 15 hrs later the backup is only 12% complete. Anyone know how long this takes. Carbonite should include that info.

I tried the introductory download and backup. My laptop no longer works. The software slowed it down, then destoyed it. This computer will no longer start up. Carbonite is not a gamble worth taking. I highly recommend going elsewhere to backup your data.

Darrell, regarding speed of backup: this is primarily limited by the upstream connection speed from your ISP. In many cases this is quite a bit slower than your downstream bandwidth.

Whew! glad to have read this blog. Saved me from getting into something that obviuosly would just frustrate me.

Thought the cost was too low for the benefits.
But they are advertising on one of the radio shows I listen to.
Wonder if any of the talking heads at the radio program have actually used it?

Tried it, bought it. Worked for a month or so. Broke. Can’t get help from Carbonite. Have entered two bug reports. How do I call these people on the phone to yell at them?

HELP!!

Hi,

thanks for the review. Just want to let you knowthat the service is also available in Germany now.

Best regards,

I’ve been using Elephant Drive for a little over a month. I’ve found it to be really easy to use. I was able to download it, and set it to backup my important folders. It seems to know whenever I change/add a file, and it backs those up everyday. I haven’t had to use it to restore yet. www.elephantdrive.com

I like that they encrypt it. And that they back-up as well.

I have also used Connected DataProtector before as well. It was a service of Iron Mountain, which is a big provider of physical backup services.

Wish I had read this before I bought a years subscription to Carbonite. After some time, Carbonite claimed my backup was complete, so I relaxed. I had a ton of Word Perfect documents, a number of Ulead Video Studio 10 videos and hours of background clips, lots of graphics and files on Virtual Mechanics Sitespinner for my website (sezme.net) hundreds of pictures etc. etc.
Lightning took our my computer, tv etc. My computer was under warranty so I sent it HP for repair. They either reformatted or replaced my hard drives (2) so all I had was a copy of windows. When I tried to restore my “everything on my PC”, Carbonite restored my desktop and that was about all. It stopped. I have written several complaints, but each time they tell me to reinstall Carbonite and try again, which I have done several time. Their “tech help” simply repeats what the original instructions are. So far my recovery is a total bust and I am about ready to call my lawyer because I am talking years of work.

Carbonite, what poor customer service. They have not responded to my emails,or to the phone number left on my credit card statement.
Issues:
forgot my password and followed the links and process but then it asks for serial number which i do not know where it is.
Its been 4 days since initial complaint with CARBONITE customer service without a reply or response.
My backup on my other HD is much easier to restore to my laptop than using CARBONITE services.
Now here is the real bad news,
I have all of our Business Servers on this system and I have doubts for complete restore.

Grade for CARBONITE CS; F-

Carbonite was good for the first two months. In order words, it’s fine as long as you don’t have a problem. I ran into a problem where I kept receiving an error message that Carbonite could not complete my backup. It took tech support two days to respond and their idea of SUPPORT is writing simply: Reinstall. If I was the average person, would I know what to do from such an answer? So I uninstalled it and then when I went to reinstall, it asked me for my password. I had stored my password in Windows, so when I uninstalled I lost the saved password. I clicked on the icon that emails me a link to reset my password. I did not receive an email or a reply for FIVE DAYS!!!! When I finally did receive it, they want me to enter my serial number which (you guessed it) can only be accessed if Carbonite is already installed. Then they asked me for personal information to “verify” my account and they wanted me to submit it over a non-secure server. They suck. It wouldn’t matter if the service was free. If you can’t get your files backed up, they have no customer support phone number, they take five days to reply to a simple password request and they want you to provide personal information over a non-secure server then they are a joke. You pay in advance, so they now have my backed up files and my money and I have no access to their service. Nice, huh? Beware, my friends. Don’t use Carbonite and check out other similar services to make sure they have a functioning phone number with actual people answering it. Otherwise, take a pass.

My situation is exactly the same as the above one.
Hard drive crashed. Got it replaced and now I can’t access Carbonot because I have no password and serial numbers. I only get generic e mails about responding the next business which has now passed. Hopefully they will read this and respond.

DAY 3

Still no help.I have got the same e mail 9 times.

Thanks for contacting Carbonite Customer Support. We have received your request and will respond as quickly as possible, usually by the end of the next business day. If you have not already visited our searchable Customer Support site, please click on www.carbonite.com/customersupport. There are many questions and answers as well as troubleshooting tips which may answer your questions more quickly.

Some answers to commonly asked questions:

1. Carbonite does not backup external or networked hard drives.
2. Initial backups can take a few days. Normal upload speeds average between 2 and 3 GB per day.
3. Trials do not back up music and video by default but full subscriptions do.
4. Carbonite does back up email. See www.carbonite.com/customersupport and search on “email” for details.

Thank You,

Carbonite Customer Support Team.

I NEED A SERIAL NUMBER TO GET A PASSWORD. I FILLED OUT THE FORM AND GAVE THE PERSONAL INFO. I STILL GET ONLY THIS E MAIL.

Many thanks to Phil and your numerous reader/writers for saving me from a late night impulse buy that The New York Times “apparently” endorsed. Special thanks to NY_Consultant1 for other products to look at. BTW, I’ll be back to read more of Bogle’s Blog.

We have tried a few online backup services, incl. Carbonite. While Carbonite’s backup software seems to be a no-brainer, but it caused more trouble in figuring out which files/folders to backup. Carbonite automatically backs up a lot of non-essential files, but left out some very important files. The non-essential files are so large such that backup takes forever. Lacking of remote access and sharing feature is a big minus. When everything considered, we picked DriveHQ.com service. They have 2 client applications that are designed for 2 but related needs: Online / remote backup and online storage & sharing. The client application is just as intuitive, and support drag and drop, etc. They have far more features than Carbonite and offers advanced featurs for advanced users.

I wanted to share with you my very good experience with Carbonite Support.

This morning (26th Sept. 2007) I have installed Carbonite and subscribed to the 2-week trial offer. Then I found out this blog, and I was a bit worried, so I contacted Carbonite and this is what I told them:

—————————-
I am a bit worried since I’ve read quite bad reviews of your online backup
service, such as:
http://thebogles.com/blog/2006/06/carbonite-online-backup/
http://www.nickstarr.com/2006/06/29/carbonite-when-unlimited-is-limited/

Could you please reassure me? I am in the trial period, and I am not sure at
this point if I want to buy the one year subscription. Maybe you can tell me
something to convince me that your service is 100% reliable? I am not
particularly worried about the backup size limitation, but I am indeed
worrried of all the users that were NOT able to restore their files!

Thanks and kind regards,
Marco Rognoni
—————————-

Please note that I am in Milan, Italy, so please also take noticed of the difference in time zones. At the start of business today in the US, I received a very nice reply from Carbonite. Here it is:

—————————-
Hello Marco and thank you for your e-mail.

I have looked at these blogs and see that Jessica McIssac from our marketing department had already replied:

The idea behind Carbonite Online PC Backup is to make online backup cheap and very easy to use for the average PC user. Think about the family member who uses a PC regularly but calls you every so often for impromptu tech support - Carbonite’s business is based around making regular backups easy for that computer user.

The “all you can eat” plan is there to make our service easy to understand for people who aren’t technically savvy. (e.g., one subscription backs up one PC - you don’t have to know how many GB you have or worry that we’re going to jack up the price on you if you go from 20 to 21GB)

The average PC user doesn’t have 100s of GB of data, and most will probably never go north of a few dozen GB.

All discussions of our profitability aside, it’s just not practical to back up 250GB using the current version of Carbonite. You’d probably get frustrated waiting for a backup that size to complete over your asymmetrical home Internet connection. (A typical home high-speed connection backs up a maximum of 2-3GB per day, so backing up 250GB would take months)

If you’ve got more questions about Carbonite, check out our FAQs:
Basic FAQs: http://www.carbonite.com/faqs.aspx
Tech FAQs: http://www.carbonite.com/faqs_tech.aspx

And if you haven’t done so already, you should try the free 15-day trial (no credit card required):
https://site1.carbonite.com/manage/signup.aspx

You can try Carbonite free on multiple computers if you’d like - just please use the same email address to download each free trial so that you can easily manage them all under one account.

Thanks guys,
Jessica from Carbonite

Carbonite’s backup is unlimited. We will backup as much data as you have on your PC. Whenever a user has trouble restoring files, it is usually a unique issue to their computer or simply user error.

I have extended your trial for two weeks to give you plenty of time to test Carbonite out.

Thank you for using Carbonite!

Sincerely,
Carbonite Customer Support
www.carbonite.com
Backup. Simple.
—————————-

Well, the above proves to me that Carbonite is an extremely serious company, with an excellent Customer Care!
I will definetely buy the yearly subscription, and I will keep you posted in case I have any issue (but I doubt, since they look very reactive and willing to support their customers).
So my experience with Carbonite is just great.

On 7/19/07 I wrote an unfavorable review of Carbonite based on my then experiences. Apparently the Carbonite crew has since been to rehab or had some kind of mystical experience, because now their product and their tech help are quite good. Opinion reversed. Thumbs up! Jim

Carbonite is great - piece of cake to use for peace of mind. A friend used it to restore his entire hard drive that died and said he did it in a very short time and was back up and running without a blip. I would highly recommend it

I have been trying for three days to restore my backed up files. When I double click the “backed up files” no files show, even though the status indicates that I have 9.3GB of files available to restore. E-mails to support remain un-answered.

I purchased this program to protect my data in the event of a disaster- which has happened. Now I have serious doubts about this company. I think that their customer support is poor.

Maybe someone can help me out.

Thanks,

Jack

I have dial-up service which is very slow. How long will it take to download Carbonite PC backup?

Hi. Well i run a computer network that has new and important files created every day, with an equal amount of users accidentally deleting some of these files. So far carbonite restore has worked well - until now. It appears that an update has been applied to carbonite, new looks and all that, and it is still backing-up. But at 9.03 yesterday a member of the muppet brigade lost a whole folder…….and carbonites restore lock, upon being accessed, just crashed. and has crashed, and still crashes even after a reinstall.
Im now worried. the clients data has gone, the muppet doensnt even remember how it happened and generally speaking im ready to kill someone. Any ideas out there - my server is 2003 r2 and i have a year and a bit subscription.

I have sent an email asking for support - i wont hold my breath, but it would be nice if some help turned up before my boss finds out……

andrew, redruth, cornwall uk

Wow! What a mixed bag of user comments…and me with only one day left in my trial to make a decision!

Incidentally, someone asked earlier about how long the initial backup takes to upload. Obviously, the answer depends on the amount of data and the speed/duration/bandwidths of the internet connection involved, but FWIW, in my case (staying connected around the clock on a 1.5Mb/250Kb DSL connection), it took a WEEK to upload a piddling 5.5 gigs (66,658 files)! No big deal, just that I’m thankful I didn’t have the “typical” 20-50 gigs someone mentioned, and/or a 45kbs dial-up connection (shared with offline time to use the telephone)! However, I expect the initial, agonizingly slow upload time is not unique to Carbonite, but rather would seem to be a facet that likely common to all on-line back-up concepts.

Carbonite slowed my system down so much, I had to stop using it. Unfortunately, Carbonite deleted a ton of files at the same time and now I’m screwed. Naturally, Carbonite hides its phone number because they don’t want to hear about it.

As of today Jan 2, 2008 the site is dead, what up? Carbonite site that is.

I have no problem with Carbonite. It may not be for IT users, but even though I am a more advanced home and work user, it does what it needs to… keeps a great offsite backup of my critical files or anything else I need.

I HIGHLY reccomend it, and whenever reading comments on the internet, always keep in mind that the “problems” will outweigh the “satisfied” people since those with issues complain more.. and also many manyu times the issue has to do with the individual users problems, not a flaw with the program… UNLESS EVERYONE is saying they have the SAME ISSUE.. which as you see above isn’t the case.

Here are some things about Carbonite:

- It puts a green dot on your file and folders when it is backed up. You ALWAYS know what is backed up. Or what is pending. GOOD feature.

- The initial backup can take a long while.. but it is totally painless. I didn’t know about these so called “restrictions” to the amount of data you can supposedly store. I have many many files it is backing up and it is 39% done after a few weeks. But that is fine… The client runs with NO performance degredation on my computer at all. It sits there silently and does its thing…

- Installing was VERY easy. Someone mentioned the non professional looking items… Wel, the interface is fine.. some of their “demos” may be too humerous for some… but c’mon.. we live in a world where Washington Mutual bank nicknamed itself WaMu!

- It does NOT by default back up videos. Even with the paid version. You actually have to select EVERY subfolder you have videos in and click backup all file sin this folder. it is a PAIN. I emaled them and they said an easier way to do this is coming (the biggest problem being is that the root doesn’t even include the subfolders. you have to click on each individual subfolder!) But once you do it once, its done.

- Some people are mentioning issues because they do not know their password or activation code. Well, if you forget your ATM code good luck getting into your bank account! Carbonite gives you this information and it is available from their online web site as well. Regardless of if it is installed.

- The one caveat is there is no web interface for file restore. Maybe they will have this one day.. I hope so. Even the junk Dell Datasafe has it (although it never worked for me). So if you are away from your computer you can not access your files. However, Carbonite is a backup program, not a file sync or file access program. You want those? Try mionet which works pretty good www.mionet.com or orb which works good, and makes your computer a file sharing machine and is free… www.orb.com. Both of those let you get into your PC.

All that said, again, I really reccomend carbonite. After major issues with Dell Datasafem I did a lot of research, and the features, and ease of use of Carbinite semms great. If you don’t belive me, try the trial yourself and see.

As for “bad” tech support… please… what is GOOD tech support? There isn’t any… and they always go off the same information you can find in any companies knowledge base anyway.. which if you are calling tech support, you probably can’t find the answer there if you are an advanced user… Not to say Carbonite is bad or good in the tech area… but unfortinately, we have let the computer tech support industry become a joke all around. I wish everyone could have phone support like American Express.

Anyway… I hope you enjoy Carbonite as much as I… Doing local backups to an external drive is ok.. until something catastrphic happens… Keeping offsite DVDs or BluRay backups is also ok… but takes a lot of time and how often can you update them and moce them away offsite…

Carbonite gets 2 thumbs up from me!

OK Let me EDIT my last comment…

I came home today and my 149 GB backup was done and Carbonite was green. It left lots of larger files not backed up. Whem I looked at them int he Carbonite Drive it said “file awaiting backup after permissions” or something like that.

This was only a few files and files of the same type int he same folder were backed up fine.

I noticed the backup was a litle north of 50 GB.

So it seems they will not back up more than 50 GB.

I have sent them an email, and as an UNLIMITED service, they best provide just that, or remove the word UNLIMITED from everything right away..

Has anyone else got Carbonite to go north of 50 GB?

OK… Now I see… after readting the blog her emore thoroughly, thanks Bogle.. it appears after 50 GB they throttle down the backup so it is slow…. very slow.. but going in the background even though the icon turns green and it says it is complere. After poking around I find it only does 500 MB a day after 50 GB. I was concerned about the files I had that were OVER 500 MB themselves but it backed those up it seems.

At this rate it will take along time.. months… to back up my entire 150 GB… but that is fine… it got the smaller files first, and once it is done once, I will be all set…

So still 2 thumbs up… althogh I see a lot of people like Mozy.. never tried it though.. this seems fine.

Anyone know if they are running out of gas? I’ve managed to upload 15gb in 6 days over my 2mbit upload connection. It seems to have big pauses (minutes) between files.

I have not had any backup for a week now due to “Carbonite server is temporarily down for maintenance”.
What does this mean? I think I’ve been ripped off, I bought the 1 year service and I watch the daily subscription time go down without any backups being performed. How does one get in touch with a real person at Carbonite? Are they still in business? I’m not getting a real good feeling here.

Carbonite

334 Boylston St - 3rd floor

Boston, MA 02116

617-587-1100

Toll Free: 877-665-4466

http://www.carbonite.com/CustomerSupport/ContactSupport.aspx?action=support

I figured unlimited for $49 a year was too good to be true.
I’m an IT professional and serious amateur photographer, so I know
I fall way outside what is considered the norm. Most online backup pricing is cost prohibitive. In my case its cheaper to just buy a dedicated server and rent an apartment to host it.

re:“Carbonite server is temporarily down for maintenance”.
What does this mean?

I’ve used Carbonite for some 6 months now (35gb) on one XP PC, and on a Vista laptop for a month. On the XP PC, I have run across this “problem” twice. The last time when it happened, Carbonite on the Vista PC reported it was ok. This pointed to a s/w issue on the xp machine.

The solution both times was to re-install Carbonite, which is an easy process taking maybe 3, 4 minutes. Go to your Carbonite accounts page, and access the tab labeled “Protected Computers”. From there are instructions for re-installing. (PS: I run both zonealarm and Trendmicro w/o any obvious problems)

I contacted support and they told me there was a glitch that affected a small number of subscribers after recent maintenance. They suggested a reinstall, which I did, and everything’s a-ok now.

No worries.

When I first got Carbonite, I thought, “This is terrific - it’s automatic and I never have to think about it.” That is, I never had to think about it until my main computer crashed. I had figure out how get to my files from my backup computer, which was not easy. And their customer service stinks! You can’t get through on their line, in fact they tell you to call back later! Are you kidding me? I have a business crisis on my hands and all I want to do is ask a few questions!!! Then they tell me that for only $19.95 per year I can get priority customer service. So you’re telling me all the people on the phone ahead of me are priority customers and I have to wait on hold for an hour, if I can get through at all!? Then I send e-mails. Their auto-responder says they’ll get back to me within 72 hours. Well, I’m still waiting…

Then trying to do a restore? What a joke. It stalls when I’m only a fraction of the way complete after letting it run overnight. I’m looking for something else.

Our issue is PDF files. Some third-party PDFs are being ignored by Carbonite and not backed up, because Carbonite thinks they’re temporary files. And we just happened to discover the problem and only after one of the colleagues wrot to them are they admitting it…

…which then begs the question…what other files are thought by Carbonite to be temporary and thus ignored, without warning us???

Putting 100% faith in Carbonite is just plain stupid. We’re not trusting it anymore, until they come cleam and tell us the path ahead.

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This message is for Julie and the problem with PDF files. A file being marked as temp is a windows attribute, and has nothing to do with Carbonite. Here is an easy way to change the attributes of all of your pdf files so they will no longer be temp files.
1. Click Start; Run.

2. Within the “Open:” text field, type cmd and press ENTER.

3. If you run Windows Vista, type CD \Users and press ENTER. (If you run Windows XP, type CD “\Documents and Settings” and press ENTER.

4. Type attrib *.pdf -t /s and press ENTER.

5. After the attrib command has finished, type EXIT and press ENTER to close the MS-DOS window.

This will remove the temp attibute on all pdf files in your user folders, and Carbonite will then back them up.

Wow. I was seriously considering this too, but now I’m not so sure. I’m so glad Google brought me here when I began looking into it. I don’t have many files that I absolutely HAVE to keep, but there is one set that is simply a must have. I cannot fool around with bad customer service nor unreliable back ups.

One thing though. On the TOS, is that still up to date? I cannot find that verbiage. Instead I found a statement that refers to another “policy” which appears to be unavailable at that site. “YOUR USE OF CARBONITE PRODUCTS IS SUBJECT TO CARBONITE’S “TERMINATION AND FAIR USE POLICY.” THIS POLICY IS INTENDED TO ALLOW CARBONITE TO DENY SERVICE TO ABUSERS.” I cannot find their “Termination and Fair Use Policy.”

The heading of that paragraph says “Termination and Fair Use Policy” but that’s only a short paragraph. Color me silly but it sounds like there is something else missing.

Well anyway, I filled out their online form for support and we’ll see where this goes. After reading Cindy Rayfield’s rant on having to pay for better customer service, I don’t have a lot of faith that they’ll even respond.

I’m just about sold on NOT using them ever. I mean, you’re already paying for the service but to actually GET customer service you have to even pay more? I don’t think so.

Thanks Bogle. This was illuminating. :)

I had to restore some files from their server, and have not been able to get any response from support regarding anything.

Their support seems awful so far.

Yesterday - I was trying to change some info in my quickbooks when I got that awful feeling that maybe it was better before I started. Of course I didn’t back up my books before my changes. Luckily for me, I had started the 2 week trial of carbonite. I was able to restore my file to before I messed it up and it worked like a charm. I was really happy with it. I love the idea of backed up files on-demand, but after reading through this forum I wonder if it gives a false sense of security…

This company has no customer service what so ever, I waited for 3 hours on hold and still 1 week later, I am still without my files. I would seek other solutions as this company is not up to par even in the slightest sense of the word. In fact, I think it is a cruel company to offer services that they just cant provide with any reliability.
This company is a joke. Even their sales line has over an hour wait.

I just had a HD crash so I lost everything including my serial number and password. I contacted Customer service and I get a email stating it will be up to 72 hr before they can respond because of all the new customers. Well I am a customer and I do not appreciate having to wait that long. I am a VP of engineering and I was going to suggest this service but, not so much now.

One of the worst programs that I have ever used. I took 6 day and two computers to get some of my files back. DO NOT USE CARBONITE. It is a bad joke

Update, for you. after 10 days of agony. It is very very obvious that this company is in well over its head.
I lost all video files and when I asked why they weren’t backed up, the Customer Service Manager told me that those files are too large so we don’t back them up by default, my total computer had 50 gigs of files on it. No compensation offered, no apologies, no nothing. They pick and chose what to back up and promise to back up everything. Shame on Carbonite.
50 edited videos lost and all the Service manager did was laugh at me and my situation. Sorry can’t recommend this product at this time. They need more staff, leadership and a clue.

I recently discovered that Carbonite quietly stopped backing up files of certain types and sizes, and in certain directories -WITHOUT TELLING ME!

Thank God, I happened to notice that
a) none of my home video files were being backed up
b) installable programs that I had purchased on CD and backed up were missing files necessary for them to be re-installable, and
c) A number of my actual documents were missing, seemingly at random.

An email to Carbonite generated the following response (3 days later):
- Videos are no longer backed up by default. I need to manually select each video file and tell Carbonite to back it up (!!!!)
- Carbonite was “never designed to backup program files”, so it ignores .exe’s and dozens of other file types. When I asked them how I was supposed to restore the software I’ve purchased on CD, they said I should just reinstall them from the original CDs. Would those be the original CDs that were destroyed in the fire/flood/theft that I bought a backup service in the first place to protect myself against?
- Carbonite ignores files with “special characters” in their file name, like underscores. Like the “special characters” that are in about a third of my critical documents’ file names?

By not telling me that it ignored a bunch of my files, seemingly at random, and telling me that my “backup was complete”, it created a dangerous false sense of security. Not to mention that it’s a fundamental breach of their “unlimited backups made simple” advertising. Very limited backups, made very complicated.

I’m bailing to another service (maybe Mozy) not so much because I’m upset at them for playing this shell game with my data after paying $80, but because I don’t want to lose my data when the class action suits/user backlash brings them down.

One quick thing, to the person above its plain and simple to see they don’t and never have done .exe and they also did a change that they now also don’t backup video files as default either now but you can add them manually.

So far I’ve only done a mini restore and it did it perfectly without a single hitch, but all is not well elsewhere.

Firsly its now not backup up all my files, I’m on the far side of 80Gb of backed up data and its now not rising. Certain files in some directories aren’t backing up for not reason at all. Sometimes is 1 in 10 files sometimes more but it just has the message “unable to backup file due to permissions” which is rubbish as they files are copied and created in the same way within the same directory.

So far a resolution hasn’t been provided in 2 weeks of trying. Fingers crossed it will be but I’m questioning it as a way of securing my files offsite for the moment I suggest others might be best doing the same.

I thinks its a great potential service but they can’t meet the demand for storage and queries at the moment.

Want the scoop see this article:

http://www.justinball.com/2008/02/22/mozycom-and-their-backup-software-is-shit/

Horible customer support. On hold for 1.5 hours so far. Restore quit twice so far. Resumed but back at the beginning. Over a week in the restore process so far with no end in sight. Better get a 500 gig external drive and do it yourself if you want to be sure.

Well I have nothing kind to say for Carbonite! I have not been able to restore any of my files to my new computer and when I call for assistance, I am put on hold forever! Today I was being stubborn and lasted on hold for over 4 hours. Unbelievable! I have sent emails with no response whatsoever except for the automated email response.

What a fraud this company is! I am so sorry I invested in the 1-year subscription. I guess you live and you learn.

I’ll be looking for another offsite storage facility, most likely and I probably won’t be able to get my money back for services NOT rendered.

Becky, How unlucky. I have not had these problems at all. It could be your computer (firewall) or something blocking it. I had a broken hard disk and lost my photos, but restored them with carbonite without any problems.

On their website there is a message from the CEO, you can email him, and he will make sure you get helped.

Downloading and installing Carbonite is easy; it’s the program and customer UNservice themselves that are absolutely pathetic and miserable.

I installed this product for my PC as I have a LOT of data to back up and I needed an offsite online backup that was affordable and had the space I needed. BIG mistake. The original backup of my data took almost 5 days. I’m okay with that because it was behind-the-scenes and there was no hurry. It was invisible to me. But FIVE days??????

However, now that I have actually suffered a hard drive failure and I need to restore my data (the whole entire point of purchasing this service) - EVERYTHING has changed.

First of all, the interface to Carbonite (ie: Craponite) is not overly user-friendly and you have no detailed way to see what is really restored and not restored or what phase the restoration is in. Oh sure, there’s a ‘Recovery Log’ that you can click - but it hasn’t changed status (currently at 52%) or updated information in DAYS. Even their customer non-support claimed it wasn’t always accurate… (then why have it?)

Also, I have been trying to restore my Outlook PST file for FOUR DAYS. Did you read that? ONE FILE = FOUR FULL DAYS AND COUNTING. It was only 1 Gig in size. Yes, that’s a large file, but NOT FOUR DAYS LARGE. Halfway through the first download, the file stopped downloading and I waited several hours before calling Carbonite hoping that it would restart and it was just their HORRIBLE restore speed. I was wrong. After calling their customer UNservice number and being on hold for 72 minutes (Yes, 1 hour and 12 minutes) I spoke with a rep. He was nice and I don’t blame him for the company’s poor service, but he said the problem was something on THEIR SERVERS that was a ‘random error’ he had never seen before. WTF!?!?! That made me feel good (NOT); a ‘random error’ on the servers of the company that I am paying to backup and safeguard MY data. He had me go into my registry and make changes so that THEIR system would ignore the error and keep restoring… Are you kidding me???? I had to modify MY registry so THEIR system would work?

THEN, I restarted the ‘restore file’ for this one PST file again on Wednesday (it’s now Friday) at 10:00 AM and it’s now Friday 9:00 AM and the file is STILL not restored. One file. Correction, it did ‘restore’ (after 24 hours each time) - but as soon as the restore completed the file was magically erased from my desktop. TWICE. I wait a full day and the system automatically deletes the file I just ‘restored.’

As an FYI, I called again this morning at 9:00 EST and got the message that I was the ‘first caller in line’. Whatever. It’s now been over 30 minutes and I’m STILL on hold (again) even though I’m the ‘first’ caller. What a fraud and scam this company is.

Better yet, I have called customer UNservice Four times over the last several days and I have been on hold for a total of over EIGHT HOURS. Did you read that? EIGHT DAMNED HOURS!!!! However, if I want ‘Priority Customer Service’ - which supposedly gets you ‘immediate’ customer service with their ‘most experienced and senior technicians’ (their on-hold message quoted verbatim) all I have to do is pay another $20 and they’ll actually answer the phone (or so they say). The message here is that normal everyday paying customers can go get screwed and only those people who pay Carbonite more money above and beyond the actual service price will ever be taken care of. The funny thing is that I DID choose to pay this money because my time is more important than $20 - but when I pressed the star key for access to this service (the ‘Priority Support Line’), the SAME TECH GUY that I had spoken with three times previously as a ‘regular’ peon customer answered - just with the new line: “Welcome to Carbonite Priorty Support”. This is the same guy that when I asked yesterday how long he had been with the company told me just THREE MONTHS! This is Carbonite’s idea of ‘most senior and experienced technicians’ - someone whose been with the company three months? The SAME NEW GUY that answers regular support calls? I asked him what the advantage of paying $20 this service was and he said I’ll only be on hold for 30 minutes instead of an hour or two. He REALLY said this. I’m paying for nothing other than to cut down (not eliminate) my hold time!!!!!

Also, if I have happened to talk to the SAME guy each and every time I have called and been on hold - doesn’t that mean that they only have 2 or 3 people supporting the entire world that uses their faulty and misleading product? I can’t be so lucky as to magically get the same person each time if there are 10 or 50 support reps.

In my opinion, Carbonite promotes false advertising and they lie about the quality of their service. They are unethical and extremely undependable. This is a pathetic company with the worst service I have EVER experienced (I would rather call India and speak with ‘Bob or ‘Nancy’ for support - does that tell you anything about how lame their support is?) and I hope that their false advertising, poor product, and miserable customer service catch up with them and that they go out of business. As soon as I get my file back I am cancelling my subscription.

Take my advice and RUN RUN RUN. Buy an external drive and backup locally. This service is horrible and the people that claim to have never had problems with Carbonite have probably never actually had to restore their data yet. This service is pathetic and I don’t have a single good thing to say about them.

At first i have about 60 gig’s of data i wanted to backup, yes on my ADSL it was taking forever, so i took my computer to work. We have a 100MEG up and down link there, it was done within the day…

Anyway, after reading all these comments i decided to test it. I removed Carbonite from this PC. I installed it as restore on another PC. My drive configuration on this other PC was different. I manually selcteded what i want to restore. I Selected my Drvive with my Photos and Video’s on it. The largest video file was 2 GIG. Over my ADSL it downloaded approx 600-700 MB per hour. I restored my backup within 2 days over ADSL. My connection was pretty much maxed out… (the limit here was my download speed of my line).

Seriously i dont see the problem you guys have.

I am glad that it works for me, since i bought 2 years subscription… So i am quite confident when my computer fails that it will work. I dont think you should expect to restore your full windows profile, etc, but just all your documents, photos and important things.

Been using Carbonite for around a month have done 20GB out of 30GB OK but the last 10GBs of files were no longer showing as pending on the status window, going into the pending files window showed them listed but labelled as “backup when accessible due to permissions”, the same was mentioned by a previous poster. After much playing about, I found that I was able to overcome this by navigating to the file in explorer, right clicking and choosing do not backup then reselected them for backup. This is a bit of hassle but seems to be back on track now.

Have been a carbonite subscriber since Jan 08, and now that I desperately need to restore to a new computer (the original hard drive crashed), I am unable to do so. I have attempted 15 times to use the restore on 4 different computers but keep getting this error: “Registration could not be processed due to an unepected error while starting Carbonite”. I have disconnected from firewalls and virus programs as suggested by Carbonite faq, I emailed support expecting an answer, telephone support gets no answer while playing a recording that faster support is available if you want to pay extra, must have credit card info ready…
I am in the income tax business and just lost 1,800 tax returns along with electronic filing data. I must have this restored ASAP. The IRS has strict requirements about the retention and secutity of such data.
Stan Suit

I enrolled in Carbonite 2 months ago. When I needed to restore some files, tech support was unable to. After 3 weeks I received an email: “your data was unrecoverable during the server downtime due to a power failure. I have added free 6 months on to your account to make up for this.” How come they don’t have a backup for their own system? Am I screwed or is there anything I can do about this? I don’t want 6 more months of a service they can’t provide.

Well I recently tested out Carbonite’s trial version and was pretty satisfied. I have about 300GB of data that I am backing up fine and the test restore also was pretty simple. I did contacted their customer support through email and got a response the next day…I guess that isn’t too bad. I just had some general questions about the software and the tech that answered my questions also gave me a coupon code for $5.00 off a subscription or renewal. The code was SP0809R24 for all of you bloggers and also I believe it expires at the end of Sept 2008. For all you people who think this backup/restore is taking too long, take that up with your ISP because it seems about right to backup around 4GB of data a day for normal high-speed internet.

Well, my laptop is on it’s last legs so I backed it up to Carbonite with the intention of transfering all my files to a new computer. Guess what? Not that easy. File transfer certainly doesn’t work the way they tell you it will. Fortunately, I can still access my laptop and am now jumping thru hoops trying to figure out how to transfer the info to the new computer. It’s about 19GB of data, and will take some time to copy via the network. But, I think it’s the only option I have. So much for Carbonite!

I purchased Carbonite about a year ago. Last month my hard drive crashed. So I tried restoring my files from my Carbonite back up. It’s been four weeks and my Carbonite is still trying to restore my files, whoopee I am up to 10% now. Over 2500 files have been lost what Carbonite says was an internal “Error” so they gave me six months of service free. I should have relied on an external drive for my back up the odds would have been that I still would have my 2500 files that were critical information. Any one else out there have the same experience with this snail mail Carbonite back up system and loss of files?

Hey all, this is a lengthy thread and quite an eye opener. I am not a Carbonite user, I use a competitor’s service. I am one of those users who actually needed the service to perform as advertised because my hard drive gave up the ghost recently and everything was lost.

The good news is that my backup service worked flawlessly and I became a HUGE fan. I had about 40 GB of data and after I reformatted my HD, I downloaded my complete backup set and was back in business. I’m a believer.

If you want to read what happened to me, the service I use and how everything worked out, see: http://www.diy-secure.com/hard_drive_failure_my_story.html

Best regards,

~Tom

I am very worried about my backup now that I have read this entire post. I hope it works later when I do need it. My computer crashed last month and I had to pay for a local computer company to save everything. It was several days to get my computer back but they did it. Next time they might not be able to retrieve everything so I’m going to try this and see what happens. I’ll post back whether it’s good or bad so people can see what my outcome is.
Thanks - Patsy

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