A Review of Carbonite: An Online Backup Site

Keeping your computer data backed up is top priority if you use a computer. If your hard drive crashes and you don't have a backup, you will be sitting in shocked horror and have only yourself to blame.

Carbonite is a business that has been around since 2005. I have seen their ads for quite some time on television. When I purchased my netbook computer it had a free 30 day trail included. I decided to activate the subscription and download the backup software to my computer. The download process went extremely well and setting up the backup was a breeze. Everything was automatic. The price for the service was also quite reasonable only because I received $17.00 off a full year's subscription by taking their discount offer while signing up for their trial service. Those were the good things about this online computer backup service.

I found a lot more of Carbonite's service that I thought was not good. You are only able to back up files that are on your computer's hard drive. If you have an external hard drive that is attached to your computer, like I do, then there is no way that the data from the external drive can be backed up to Carbonite. The reasoning is that this is a drive that may not be available for every backup and so at this time Carbonite does not support backing up external drives. It may become available at a future date for an additional cost. One thing that is very important that you should be aware of is, if you delete any files from your computer they will also be deleted from Carbonite. Don't confuse Carbonite's service with a file archiving service. If you want to save photos or files permanently, then you will want to search for some other type of service or use an external drive for archiving purposes.

The first time you do a backup can take a lot of time. In fact it, if you have a lot of data on your computer it will take several days. It is all done in the background and doesn't seem to impede the operation of your computer. After that Carbonite will continue to do backups on any files that are newly added to your computer. One thing I found concerning was that Carbonite will not backup up, automatically, any files that are more than 4gb. I don't think that I have any files this large on my computer. You are, however, given an option to backup those large files manually.

I made the mistake of signing on the dotted line for a year's subscription before I actually had enough information to make a good decision. I was really looking for an archiving service where my files could be stored safely offsite. It's not a bad service, it's just not what I was looking for and it is limiting. When you sign up for the subscription you can back up one machine. You can purchase additional subscriptions for your other machines, but I didn't see a discounted plan for multiple computers. Maybe, if you actually enroll additional machines, they might offer discounts through the enrollment process. I would rate this service a 2 out 5 stars

Source:
Personal Experience