Carbonite Online Backup review

Gallery

Verdict:

Even Han Solo would like it. Easy to use, secure and fairly priced, but not as flexible as some of the other online options.

Review Date: 14 Nov 2008

Price when reviewed: inc VAT per month

Reviewed By: Karl Wright

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

With Carbonite, for less than three quid a month you get 'unlimited' online storage.

That's a great deal, and it's easy to use too: just install the client program on your PC, tell it which folders you want to back up, and it does the rest. You can define a schedule if you want, but the program's default behaviour is to backup whenever your PC is idle.

A file or folder in the process of backing up is marked with a yellow dot, and when it's finished the dot turns blue. The first backup takes ages - several hours if you have a lot of data. This is a chore, but given that you're transferring gigabytes of data there's no way around it, and subsequent backups are much faster. Recovery is easy: just open the Carbonite InfoCenter, select the Restore option, right-click the file you want to recover and choose Restore from the context menu. Carbonite uses the 448-bit Blowfish encryption algorithm, which has so far proved uncrackable, so nobody else will ever get at your stored data.

If we're looking for imperfections, it's annoying that the size of the InfoCenter is fixed, and you can't expand it to fill the screen. You're also limited to one PC per licence, so you can't access your data from a friend's PC or a work laptop, for instance, without shelling out for another subscription. For some users, that'll be a serious limitation. If it doesn't bother you, this is a great value service that's no hassle.

Prev Next

Get more reviews, tutorials and in-depth advice, every month with Computer Shopper.
Click here to try 3 issues for £1

< Previous Reviews : Multimedia software Next >

Sponsored Links

User comments

Carbonite 'Unlimited' back up is misleading

I'm currently in the process of my initial backup of around 500gb of date. However at 200gb I noticed a serious drop in the rate at which my data was being backed up. After having checked my broadband and pc settings I finally discovered that Carbonite restrict upload speed after 200gb. In reality this means I am looking at around 18 MONTHS to complete my initial backup and that doesn't include any additional data I add to my pc. If you add more than sat 4gb per week (easily achieved if you are a keen photographer) you will never get all your files backed up.

Add to that the appalling customer service I've had so far where they refuse to respond to this issue. I've had two evasive emails and no response from a senior rep that I was asked to contact.

By trdg01 on 12 Nov 2010

A nasty bug they don't tell you about

There is a serious bug in the remote access facility (accessing your backed-up file from another machine). Any files with names containing special characters or trailing spaces cannot be retrieved. This is a known bug (see http://carbonite.custhelp.com/... but I only found out the hard way when I really needed a file that contained an ampersand. Why on earth haven't Carbonite fixed this, or at least informed their users of the position so they could do a bit of renaming for their most important files? It can't be very difficult to fix. Carbonite seem to have acted very amateurishly and it worries me that there may be other bugs that I don't find out about till they jump out and bite me!

By RSDonovan on 3 Aug 2011

Leave a comment

You need to Login or Register to comment.