Carbonite file back up service

Jeb Brookshire · **Posted:** Tue Sep 21, 2010 8:24 pm

Anyone use this service? I am getting more and more concerned about what I would lose in the event of a hard drive failure. $54.95 a year for unlimited space, data encryption and recovery seems really appealing, unless of course thier facility gets destroyed....

Dustin Fredrickson · **Posted:** Tue Sep 21, 2010 8:55 pm

Jeb Brookshire wrote:

Anyone use this service? I am getting more and more concerned about what I would lose in the event of a hard drive failure. $54.95 a year for unlimited space, data encryption and recovery seems really appealing, unless of course thier facility gets destroyed....

Looks to be a solid service from the little I've read. I too have been thinking about using one of these services, and I've already got multiple levels of redundancy in my data at home.

Review here: http://www.backupreview.info/content/Ca ... Jan_08.pdf

Aaron Buckley · **Posted:** Tue Sep 21, 2010 9:01 pm

How much storage are you talking about? A 2TB Western Digital Worldbook will likely get it done easily and have redundancy built in... for under $200. - AB

Charlie Guthrie · **Joined:** Thu Aug 28, 2003 8:14 pm **Posts:** 832

The instructions from my home IT guy (neighbor) is to grab my Firewire connected backup drive and head for the door in case of fire...yeah right, I'll remember that.

Aaron is right that the cost of a great backup drive is less expensive, but where would you store it to protect it in the case of a natural or un-natural disaster? The odds that the remote site would burn down simultaneously with your house are remote. If your house goes the data goes with it.

Of course, knowing this has not motivated me to buy off-site storage...yet.
Charlie G

DickRasmussen · **Posted:** Tue Sep 21, 2010 9:31 pm

I don't personally have any experience with off-site backup services. However a trusted tech geek at work uses/recommends backblaze.com

My personal off-site backup is a physically small drive in a safe deposit box. We update it every 6 months or so. Obviously not a solution for a business or other critical (to you) data. At work I keep everything on the backed up network drive which has off-site storage and a working copy on my laptop . . . which is "off-site" from work nights and weekends.

RobLupella · **Posted:** Tue Sep 21, 2010 9:31 pm

Some of the IT guys at work use this service and have said good things about it. I use the USB drive as a backup device.

JasonWatts · **Posted:** Tue Sep 21, 2010 10:20 pm

one thing not mentioned that will likely not be an issue for you for home backups. You have to consider the amount of data you will be pushing up on a regular bassis. if its alot, like your entire blueray collection that you add to frequently, it will likely never finish sync'ing in a 24 your period.

JamesMilko · **Posted:** Tue Sep 21, 2010 11:00 pm

Portable hard drives is good enough for my personal data. If you want it offsite leave it in your drawer at work. I'd suggest some kind of encryption in that case though.

MarekRozanski · **Posted:** Wed Sep 22, 2010 9:07 am

I used Carbonite for a while, but kept running into issues with their software (kept getting "corrupt database" errors and prompts to uninstall/reinstall it), so I kicked it to the curb in favor of Mozy. Works basically the same way, just a little more reliable. It's not my primary backup method, though, because of bandwidth issues -- see my comment in a previous post:
http://www.thscc.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=92352&highlight=#92352

If you have a small amount of data (under 2-3GB), that you want to keep backed up at all times, nothing beats the reliability and convenience of Dropbox (I've tried them all).

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