Review: Carbonite online backup
Iain Laskey examines an online backup service with a cool name and a tempting price.
| Product | Carbonite |
|---|---|
| Company | Carbonite, Inc |
| Web | www.carbonite.com |
| Price | $49.95 |
| We like | Solid functionality, well thought out, cheap, unlimited storage |
| We don't like | Incompatible with some 3rd party file managers , file exclusions can cause confusion initially |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements | XP or Vista 32bit/64bit only |
Nothing strikes fear into a computer user more than the click of a dying hard drive or an error message when trying to read a file. We all know we're supposed to back up regularly but you can bet that when data loss occurs, it will be weeks or months since your last backup.
Carbonite (great name, Star Wars fans!) is an online backup service that sits in the background constantly checking for changes to data files and copying them to the Carbonite storage vault when needed. The price for this is around £25 a year which buys you unlimited storage. This sounds great but bear in mind that gigabytes of data can take days over your average broadband connection because uploads are much slower than downloads.
Set Up
You start by downloading the client program from the Carbonite web site on a 15 day free trial. When first run, you can select for automatic selection of files and documents or manual. We'd strongly advise the former as you can always tweak things later and this way you can be sure your email, web browser settings and so on will be covered.
Once installed, it scans your hard disk for data to backup. Be aware that certain file types such as program files and video clips do not get backed up by default so it's worth checking the web site for details of what will get covered. You can however manually select individual files or file types if required using a right click menu in Windows Explorer. This aspect of Carbonite did initially confuse us as we added a folder to be backed up then found all the new files we added to it were being ignored, it turned out we had to add some additional file types as they were mainly video files.
The initial backup took several days but after that, the incremental changes happened much more quickly. The whole process is automatic and needs no user intervention, just leave it to get on with things. It uses very little system resources so caused no noticeable system slowdown on our test PC. It also has the option to work in low priority mode to allow other processes such as Skype to get better use your broadband connection.
Very busy files are only backed up when they've been dormant for a period of time which is a nice touch although you can force a backup at any point using the 'Backup ASAP' option in the Carbonite client.
The system does give priority to smaller files when backing up to maximize what's protected. It also tries to do documents first, then photos then audio.
Restoring
We tried recovering a few files and found it worked well. Carbonite adds a new 'fake' drive to Windows Explorer from which you can browse the backups before selecting restore. It remembers older versions so you can recover an earlier version of a Word document if needed - very handy. Carbonite does remove versions older than 3 months though so you won't have them all forever. Because of the asymmetric nature of most broadband connections, restore is much quicker than backup.
Security
One important aspect of trusting your backup to a third party is security. Carbonite encrypts the data as it's backed up and they claim your backed up data is only accessible by you and your PC. Carbonite also adheres to the European Safe Harbor principles for extra peace of mind. Carbonite themselves do keep a copy of your encryption key though so if you need to restore to a different PC, you only need your Carbonite password to be able to access your files on their servers.
The data is stored on RAID arrays on Carbonite's servers and the data held remotely is checked against the copies on your PC from time to time to ensure integrity is good.
Compatibility
Carbonite currently only supports XP and Vista in both 32bit and 64bit incarnations. We were disappointed to find some aspects of the software only worked using Windows Explorer and 3rd party file managers such as Xplorer 2 did not have the correct right-click menu options or place the dots next to each file that Carbonite uses to indicate the backup status. Apart from that though we had no problems at all using it on our test system.
It only works with the hard drives built in to your PC so external USB drives or networked drives won't get backed up although we understand an option for backing up external drives may be made available soon.
Mac users are out of luck at the time of writing although support is being worked on and you can ask to join the beta testing team via the Carbonite web site.
Support
We made use of the support options a few times and found the web site's FAQ's covered all our questions with clear explanations and advice. When we contacted Carbonite directly, they got back quickly with sensible suggestions and advice so a thumbs up there.
Conclusion
We were very impressed with Carbonite. It's a very slick system that you can trust to keep your backups up to date without getting in the way of normal working. The software is easy to use and flexible enough to allow individual files to be added or removed from the backup process. We also appreciated being able to return to earlier versions of files. The unlimited storage and low price for the peace of mind makes this a highly recommended service with our only real grumble being the lack of support for third party file managers - and that's easily fixed by reverting to Windows' own explorer when needed.
