At a Glance
Our Rating
Price:
- 15 Day Trial: $Free
- One Year Subscription: $54.95.
- Two Year Subscription: $99.95.
- Three Year Subscription: $129.95.
Pros:
- Support for Windows and Mac
- Easy sign up.
- Easy download and set up.
- Unlimited backup storage space.
- Free trial with unlimited space.
- Backs up locked and open files.
- Fast.
- Will recover old versions of files.
- Data encryption.
- Private encryption key.
- Continuous backups.
- Available in eight languages.
- IPhone application now available.
- Offers web access to files.
Cons:
- Must purchase by the year, no month to month is available.
- Does not distinguish between certain files such as gif, jpg, etc. Does not understand all are picture files.
- Does not backup video files by default.
- Does not backup external drives.
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Latest Posts / Deals about Carbonite
- Carbonite Releases iPhone App
- 30 Day Carbonite Trial for Free with Java Update
- Carbonite for Mac Released and Announce Price Increase
- Carbonite Expands to New Data Center
- Online Backup Blogs
Full Review
If a good online backup service is what you need to make your life easier and more secure then you may wish to look at Carbonite. Carbonite even has a free trial without providing a credit card, so you can truly learn if this is the service that will work for your particular situation.
The download and setup is one of the easiest and within about 3 minutes, you will be ready to start backing up your files. You can easily choose the drives, folders, etc… you have on your computer you wish to backup and Carbonite does the rest. You will have an icon in your system tray that will help you simple backup files as needed.
For those that really want a backup system that needs no hands, the automatic backup features works wonders. Of course, the first backup will take awhile according to how much have to backup, but once this is done, you will not notice the backup process. The system backups your files while the computer is idle.
In order to know which files have been backed up, you will notice small dots in various color depending on the type of file, document, or if the file is waiting to be backed up. If there is no dot, then the file has not been backed up and is not waiting for the backup process.
In order to backup the files, all you have to do is right click on the item, go to the Carbonite option, and choose to backup the file.
Restoring your files is just as simple. On you need to do is go to the option, My Computer where Carbonite has already added another drive, this is your remote storage where you can find all the documents and files you have backed up. When you click on that drive you will see all the items you have backed up. Now, just copy those to your computer in the location you desire.
This is one of the most simplest online backup services I have seen. Along with being so simple to use, all of your items will be encrypted before they are sent to the server for backup. You will be the only person with the encryption key, therefore the only person able to retrieve or see your files.
The price of Carbonite is $54.95 per year for unlimited backup and storage of your precious files.
5 Comments
I updated the review to reflect a price increase and the new Mac support. Let me know if I missed anything.
A HUGE ‘CON’ to this product is that it STILL does NOT support external drives. Many of my most important files are stored on my 4 external hard drives. Product is useless to me without this support. Suggest you point this out in your cons list.
The Windows version will also only backup partitions formatted as FAT32 or NTFS. (If anyone can find this info on their website, I will be impressed.) Presumably the Mac version will do HFS Plus, but I have no idea if it will do any others, including UFS or indeed the two the Windows version will. (Again, if you can find this info on their website…)
Why it should care about which file system I want to use, I don’t know. (If it will work with FAT, it should work with anything!)
I also don’t know why it insists it will only work with file systems considered too poor for Carbonite to use itself. (See their blog – www.Carbonite.com/blog/post/2008/05/HP-Upline-and-the-challenge-of-large-scale-backup.aspx – when they asked Microsoft why NTFS kept crashing for them, they were told it wasn’t designed to have large numbers of files on it!)
I have it, I like it, but this still grates.
I did not know that it only supports FAT32 and NTFS. How do you find that out? I suppose that is the majority of Windows computers but I can see how that would be annoying.
Thanks for that information. I am sure it will be useful for someone.
Trying it
I dual boot into Windows and Linux. The Ext2fs.sys driver from http://www.fs-driver.org gives Windows a kernel mode file system driver to read Ext2 and Ext3 partitions – they appear exactly like any other drive in Windows – so I can read/write to the Linux partitions from Windows (and of course can read/write the Windows ones in Linux). Very useful.
But Carbonite refused to have anything to do with them. So I asked their tech support who (finally) told me the awful truth: it’s deliberately limited to those two file systems. They cannot or will not tell me WHY, despite repeated invitations to do so. There are clearly no technical reasons – if it can work with something as primitive as FAT, it should work with anything.
So now, with more effort than should be necessary because NTFS is missing some useful features, I have Linux use NTFS for its /home partition (i.e. all the user’s files).
(Oh, I had to ask about the Mac version. Apparently “Of the default available File Systems in Mac OS X 10.5, Carbonite supports all of the Mac OS Extended variations, but not the FAT filesystem.” What that means, I’m not quite sure as the Apple site doesn’t exactly consider ‘which file systems will it work with?’ to be a question worth answering either.)