Carbonite – Stay Away
A while ago, I decided that I needed an off-site backup solution so after testing some providers, I settled on Carbonite as my provider of choice. I am an amateur photographer and after a few years of RAW photography, I’ve hit around 120GB of files and other less important things.
I installed Carbonite and it has been whizzing away backing up files as it saw fit and everything was right in the world of my backups. I recently reinstalled Windows on my box and followed the instructions on the Carbonite site to restore the application to my PC. And so begin the problems.
The first issue began when I remoted into my machine and noticed the primary OS partition (20GB, don’t ask) was full with 0 bytes free. Running a quick check on the drive I found that Carbonite had helpfully created a 3GB log file. Irrespective of what caused this log file to be created, there is no reason why it should be allowed to run amok on my system filling up the drive. Even better is that it is created in c:\documents and settings\all users. Irrespective of that it contains, a quick look shows full path names to files, nothing major, but why? A fast (ok 25 minute) live chat with a support representitive and we came to the conclusion that the best method to solve this problem is to uninstall Carbonite. Brilliant!
The second issue was with some weirdness with the application which has completely broken my belief that the backup system actually works. When Carbonite installs, My Computer has a new item installed called the Carbonite Backup drive. This allows you to see what is backed up and other such information. This useful little drive was telling me my main 115GB backup was pending. However, the application that runs was showing me the backup was complete and was taking no further action. Which one do I believe? Is my data secure? Another short (15 minute) live chat and we came to the conclusion that a reinstall would help. Nope it wouldn’t, no change there. Well how about you send us the log files? Ummmm, these are 3GB big, how would you like them?
This is on top of the fact that Carbonite does NOT backup video files without being explicitly told to backup EACH file. You have to mark individual video files that they must be backed up. Helpfully Carbonite support will point you to an entry in their FAQ that tells you this and honestly I believed the front page of their site which says “Completely Automatic”.
The experience has been far from pleasant. The amount of time I’ve had to spend on Live Chats with people that can’t move from the support script they’ve been given, and the fact the software is pretty rubbish means I’m not staying. I’ve asked for a refund and hopefully I’ll get a response, but hopefully this blog post helps some others from making the mistake I did.