I am personally not a big fan of Mozy, mainly due too their privacy statement that essentially entitles them to share my user information and backed up content with whom ever they see fit.
http://mozy.com/privacy
check under disclosures, I actually showed this to a lawyer friend of mine and he was shocked. Now I don't know if this is a European paranoia thing but it's worth noting I think.

Also because there are alternatives that offer better privacy protection especially for European users. KeepIt is an example of a company that offers the exact same (unlimited bacup) without violating my european statutory rights.
https://www.keepit.com/privacypolicy

If you are a corporate user or have the money to burn I personal favorite is rsync. (use it at work to backup super important mobile units)
http://rsync.net

Unfortunately KeepIt is till working on their mac software, so until then I am stuck with a subfolder on my companies servers, at the grace of our IT department.

Personally, if I ever get online backup of some sort, I will be using Mosso CloudFiles for the service it provides. Again, unlimited storage space that expands as you need it. You only get charged for what is used also (15 cents a Gig right now), so it automatically starts off cheaper than Mozy.

I've already used it for my first free month and I loved how well it worked. With Cyberduck I can backup many files and folders at once with no problem, and the CDN allows me to also link to those files or folders if I want to share them with someone (or take loads off of my website).

Mozy is cool though, I've used it with some success in the past and have considered going back.

Thanks for this article. I've always wondered what 'Unlimited Storage' meant, so it was good to read that you have clarified this. I think I'll give Mozy a try for a few months and see how I get on.

Hi, David. I’d appreciate it if you would send me the blog where you read that Carbonite has a 100GB limit. I would like to set the writer straight. We have users with over a terabyte backed up, and thousands of customers who are backing up more than 100GB. There is no limit, and never has been.

I keep asking writers, and I will ask you, to check such facts with us before publishing them because once these rumors get started, they just have a life of their own, as you can see from your own experience. People have also said that Mozy is limited, but we have tested Mozy and I can assure you that they do not any limit either.

Another thing I'd ask is if you are going to review backup services, test the restore process. This is where Carbonite really stands out. Restores are fast, accurate, and there are wizards to help you if you're migrating to a different operating system (e.g., XP to Vista). No need for shipping DVDs or hard drives through the mail.

Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.

David,

I'm currently testing out Carbonite. I've used Mozy as well as iDrive. The only reason I tested iDrive was because they seemed to have more support for OS X, which they in fact do. The only hitch with them is they go up to 100GB's for a comparable price to Mozy and if you'd like more, well it cost more.

Mozy was nice and I was able to get up around 80GB with them, before the uploads started to run really slow and the application started to consume massive amounts of resources. The biggest decision to switch was when I found out that my wife's computer said it was backed up, but when trying to restore some files, they weren't actually there. This could have been a user error on my end, but I don't think that was the case.

Carbonite has been the best thus far. The application seems to run good, I however wish it would index faster than it does. It has currently been indexing my system for over a month now, I have a little over 9 million files totaling close to 2TB. Currently I have 63GB uploaded in the month that I've used them, but things seemed to have slowed down. I think this is due to Carbonite still trying to mull through all of my files and get an index before it finishes uploading. I tested the system with a small portion of my files, 70GB worth and then added more when I saw how well it was doing. Maybe I should cut that back and step it out.

I am also running Carbonite on my wife's iMac and it seems to be doing well. I have had it throttled since it was installed 3 weeks ago and there are roughly 30GB worth of files uploaded, with another 40GB to go. Her computer is very important to my wife and myself, simply because all of our family pictures and videos are stored on hers.

Once I can get all of my files backed up, or at least try. I will be posting an in depth entry on my personal blog about my experiences and the total files that were upload, as well as size and times. I'm also planning on setting up a test and seeing how well the application actually restores files. I keep triple local backups, so I will be deleting around 50GB worth of files and having them restored. I want to make sure that Carbonite can handle it and how fast it is, so I can plan for it in the future if it is ever needed. If it can't restore 50GB, I don't think it will be able to handle 2TB.

Hope my experience's help someone in need.

Regards,
Mike Bowden
Sinco Technologies, LLC.

Is there also a unlimited backup available for externals media like DVD, CD or my removeable drives.
As far as I know mozy only offers the ability to backup media whcih stay attached to your computer which is in my opinion useless.

I would like to store my taken footage on a save place without the need of keeping my drives attached to my notebook :|

I use Skydrive from Live.com it has 25GB of space for free.

But, Mozy.com seems good if you have a lot of Data.

The main problem I see with using online backup is my ISP warning me that I am using too much of their bandwidth uploading all my files.

Mozy will allow you to back up external and network drives IE NAS which carbonite won't allow. So carbonite is limited to what is on the internal hard drive of your computer

I was just about to sign up for Carbonite, I am glad I found this site!

Carbonite doesn't allow external or NAS backups!?! That is a deal breaker for me.

I am concerned about my privacy and security with an online back up service. Will my personal information be compromised and/or shared with others? What about my security and passwords. Is there a danger of spyware entering into my system?

@Mark, I fail to see where Mozy's privacy policy is a concern:

"
Legal Requirements

Decho does not disclose Personal Data, including the data you back up with the Service, unless disclosure is necessary to comply with an enforceable government request such as a warrant.
"

Sounds ok to me.

I can't get mozy to back up network drives either. When I tried a year ago they said that you can back up an external drive always attached to your computer but as soon as you detach it it will be erased from the backup.

So how did you get mozy to back up a Network drive?? I it really can I'll stay with mozy, otherwise I think I'll try carbonite.

At some point, Carbonite started backing up my external hard drives. Since I'd read that they were going to add that service later, I wasn't surprised. What did surprise me was when the data backed up to those external drives suddenly disappeared from my backup. I contacted support who informed me that they've never backed up external drives. Well, they must have had a bug, because I had over 500 GB from external drives backed up.

For those of you who'd like to try something else, some people report success by creating a mount point for external drives as subdirectories on their internal drives. Carbonite thinks they're just subdirectories, so the contents are merrily backed up.

While I can't currently see a limit to Carbonite's backup, it does seem to get throttled at some point. I've just installed an IP logger so I can view traffic going across the pipe. Yesterday afternoon I had about 300MB backed up. This morning, there was no traffic at all from Carbonite even though I have 235GB pending. I did get it to go again by pausing it and unpausing. I will also note that Carbonite has been working on the same file, which has a size of about 1.7 GB. Yes, it's a large file. I point this out to note that Carbonite's halting has nothing to do with searching for more files or indexing.

One final comment for those watching Carbonite progress updates. The units used in the status screen start out with MB, then switch to GB, then to TB. Each time the units change in this way, you should expect it to take 1000 times as long for the number to update. Once your backup is large, you can't tell by looking at the total backup size whether the backup is progressing. You can tell by the file name, but if the file is a large file, the status won't change. That's why I installed an IP traffic logger.

By the way, about 27MB were backed up while I composed this note. My total backup size is about 1.3 TB.

Read Carbonite's term of usage, particularly section 14:

"Your consumption of Carbonite Products or Services may be deemed excessive if, within any month, your usage greatly exceeds the average level of monthly usage of Carbonite's customers, generally."

This does not sound "unlimited" to me.

"Carbonite may require you to switch to an appropriate Carbonite Product or Service which may result in your having to pay Carbonite additional fees for use of the appropriate product or to terminate your purchased Carbonite Products or Services and refund, on a prorated basis, any fees paid you may have paid on the unused portion of your Carbonite subscription."

Let it be known, this contract gives them the right to one day charge you extra based on the amount of data you have on their servers. Point blank. Unless the CEO puts his "truly unlimited" claim in the terms of the contract, it is worthless noise.

The problem with SkyDrive is that you can't drag and drop folders and subfolder/files. Only if you create a new folder in skydrive can you drag files in. But not folders. This means new stuff isn't too hard, but already existing folders of music and pictures are a huge pain. I installed skydrive only to find this out. No more usage for me.

I'm interested in carbonite, but hate costs. What would be sweet is external hard drives that can talk to each other. put one at home, one at relative's or friend's house. Then you could sync between each other. And you know where your data is.

I am in the free trial period for Carbonite but did not realize that they do not back up external hard drives. I have two on which I store all of my pictures. What is the best thing to do to make sure all of my digital images are backed up?

If you use a NAS that support iSCSI, like synology. The NAS storage is not an issue at all. It is seem as a real local drive in windows.

Steve, I agree. Mozy's privacy policy seems okay.

I signed up for the free trial of Carbonite yesterday and am pleased with it so far. But, I find the claim of "unlimited" storage misleading. I read in the help section of the site that if I remove a file from my local hard drive it is removed from the Carbonite Cloud after 30 days. So, the "unlimited" storage claim is clearly limited to the capacity of my internal hard drive. I'm trying to find an affordable cloud solution to store my photos and music. I currently store them all on two external hard drives to reduce the space on my PCs internal hard drive. Right now it appears the "Unlimited" storage being offered is limited to the capacity of my internal hard drive?

It's an online backup service, not an online file repository service. In backup systems, you have the concept of a backup retention policy. The reason is you maintain many levels of your backups so you can restore to an older version if so desired because it's not just storing your files, it's storing versions of your files. With that said, if you have 10gb of data being backed up, your dataset is going to be much larger after some time. Retention policies are designed to keep this from getting out of hand.

Yes, if you delete something from your computer, it will eventually delete from the backup due to the retention policy. Since it appears mozy and carbonite use a 30 day retention policy, that's how long it takes to fall off. It's to prevent an "oops", not to store just store files offsite. If you accidentally delete a file and don't realize it within 30 days, it probably wasn't important enough anyway. If you want a longer retention policy, you'll probably want to sign up for a business style setup, use a pay per usage system, or set something up at home.

Hard drive space is cheap these days. If you need more storage space, buy it. If you can't afford it, modify your data consumption habits.

There are so many bad experiances out there. When I went to research them I was amazed. Backazon.com has a great software title, cheap, easy to use, and they have versioning which is true backup.

Wuala looks interesting. Just $25 for 10GB and you can access your files from anywhere, others can access your files if you choose, you can edit, and manually send back to the backup. Worth checking out.

http://www.wuala.com/en/learn/features

I just subscribed to Carbonite; however, I would not have done so if I had known that they do not backup external hard drives. I can't believe that I had to find out the hard way (by subscribing and trying to save data backed up on an external drive) and that Carbonite did not warn me. People that buy Carbonite tend to have a lot of music and other files worth protecting on external drives. To not protect data from external drives is a major flaw and huge blow to Carbonite's overall utility. I want my money back and my subscription cancelled. For the price of Carbonite, I could have bought a 1TB external storage backup for my existing external drive and been perfectly happy. I hope this note makes its way to Carbonite's management. If I get my money back — some harm and some foul from what I believe is deceptive promotion by Carbonite — If I don't, I will be a mouse that roars. Again,I hope everyone out there understands that Carbonite does not back up data on external drives.

I was against Carbonite when I started to read this article. Then I read David Friend's response, and I was for them. Then I read the comments, and now I'm against them again. Let's review:

By "unlimited" Friend actually means:
-no external hard drives
-no network drives
-no "excessive usage," which is determined solely by Carbonite

As with most people in power, Friend needs to be stood up in front of an audience and made to answer all of these complaints before he can be trusted. Maybe he should spend more time on customer service and less on defending his company from bloggers (he's done so on several other blogs).

wow, you guys really expect a lot for a little. I have 370GB backup up on Carbonite for ~$50 a year. How can I complain? They don't backup network and external drives because they think it's reasonable (and I do too) that you should have to buy more than one license if you have more than one machine you want to backup (as opposed to just mapping drives to the other machines and abusing the one license). For about $4 a month, let carbonite do the work for you.

I agree with Rick. Carbonite is meant for backing up one computer. By allowing external drives / mount points, it opens the possibility to back up an entire network of computers with one account. Internal drives are insanely cheap at this point. Set up backup software on all the non Carbonite-protected computers to transfer relevant data to your Carbonite-protected pc. Then have Carbonite backup all relevant files on that ONE machine. This setup will provide a local backup also, which gives you a MUCH faster restoration after data loss on any of the machines. Also, internet traffic is isolated to one machine, reducing (or at least concentrating) overall traffic on your network.

@Kaiser

How hard was this to find? Carbonite clearly states no external devices here:

http://carbonite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1386/kw/external

I strongly disagree with Rick and Carson. I only own one computer, and it has two additional HDs inside. I need the additional HDs backed up because that is where I store my graphics and other large files. ONE MACHINE, mine! My HDs are internal drives, so the question is, does Carbonite back-up all the drives INSIDE ONE machine?

NOTE: One should NEVER store huge amounts of large files on your OS's HD (C drive)! I have 300GB of photos and graphics on my internal "D" drive and THAT is what I need backed up, not the little 500MG of text files that I can copy and place on other HDs in seconds.

I find these online back-up services are useless if they can not my back-up all internal HDs! ...and I'm not the only one who thinks that!

Does anyone know of a service that backs up all the drives rather than just the "C" drive of a computer?

Velocitor: I use Carbonite, and store media on an internal drive separate from my OS/programs drive. Carbonite can and does backup both.

The complaints Carson and Rick are rebuking are people complaining about not being able to backup externally connected drives, whether through eSATA (as opposed to an internal drive's SATA), USB or Firewire. And frankly, I fully agree with them as well. I bought a 640GB internal SATA drive that performs like a beast for like $40. Internal storage is cheap and a lot harder to forget on the bus if you take it somewhere.

Seriously. Make your internal drives the main storage depository. Use a backup service there (Mozy or Carbonite, for example). Use your external drives to carry copies of your important files when traveling so that if you lose that drive, you only lost a copy, and the online backup in case something truly bad happens.

CrashPlan:
External Drives: Yes
NAS Drives: Yes
Truly Unlimited: Yes
Network Throttling: No
Unlimited data for all computers in your house: Yes
Backup to Local Drive: Yes
Backup to another computer: Yes
Law Enforcement Can See your data: No (Provide your own key/password)

Least Expensive in all scenarios: CrashPlan.

http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/features-compare.html

(I work there, took time to comment only because it was a great thread with real points.. Impressive you've read the privacy policies

My dissatisfaction with Carbonite had less to do with the limitation to internal storage - I would be perfectly happy to pay more for backing up my external - than with their misrepresentation of it. Someone thought that their deep-in-the-FAQ statement on this anounted to transparency? Really? Trust me: having contacted them to request a refund, I can assure you that misleading people about this is part of their business plan.

These are probably good services, but i choose to use one of the following;
- Unlimited web hosting can be had for as little as $44.00 a year. Why limit to just backing up data? Backup many servers to the same place.
- An eSata docking station and a few 1TB drives is superfast, stupidly simple, and the daily HD is kept offsite, readily available even if the internet is down...but that can't happen right?

I used carbonite for a year and when i had to restore to another computer....half of the data was unreadable.

CARBONITE NOT RECOMMENDED
I just went through a nightmare trying to restore data from Carbonite after my computer had to re-install windows due to a virus. Customer support had no idea how to help except to offer to 'take control of my computer'. I finally figured out how to restore (customer service did not tell me a simple fix) but then files were all over the place. It took nearly 3 days to restore 24 gig of data and will probably take weeks to find everything & put it back in the correct place. Even if you re-install the original programs, that does not mean Carbonite will put data into the correct folder. It is a mess and my hard drive is way too full of useless things they backed up. I will be cancelling the remainder of my subscription & happily return to external drive backup .. which I can restore in under an hour & only what I need.

Given the experience I have had with online backup, I am hoping to help others avoid it.

I decided to use Sugar Sync in January. On May 10, I had to do a hard drive restore of my computer – it was not a crash, so I checked and saw that 17 GB of my data, music and photos were all backed up on Sugar Sync before we proceeded. I checked a few of my most recent files and music, just to be sure I was confident in what was there.

On May 21, I was in the midst of a restore process with Sugar Sync (which was not easy) and all of my data disappeared – not kidding. The entire file structure was back onto my computer, but every folder was empty. The data had been inadvertently deleted in the process. Through a PAINFUL communication process (I could never talk to anyone by phone without paying $99 and their chat was only open 7-4 M-F) and 2 weeks, they recovered my data – which took me several more chat episodes to get restored properly.

That is, all except my music, which mysteriously would not restore.

On June 5 (yes it's now 2 weeks later) I was “chatting” with Sugar Sync online about this (with an Indian person and I mean no prejudice, just hard to communicate) who told me they would escalate my issue to their engineers (I had heard this more than once in 2 weeks), and I would hear back “as soon as possible.” Now it is June 9 and I still have yet to hear back – 5 DAYS LATER.

In the meantime 2 unbelievable things have happened:

(1) I discovered that about 2/3 of my music was missing from the backup – ie, I would have 3 songs from Black Eyed Peas on my iPod but only one of them backed up and restored to iTunes – my bad that I didn’t do a more thorough check of what was being backed up; and

(2) Three crucial folders of data from my desktop DISAPPEARED between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning – the book I had just spent a year writing, and 2 client folders. I was literally sick to my stomach – how is it possible that an online backup service actually DELETES your files? I’m fairly tech-savvy, this was not a weird user error!

Sugar Sync has yet to provide any explanation for why it randomly did not back up my iTunes properly, or why it deleted folders from my desktop. They only suggested that I "stop" backing up my desktop and do it manually until they could determine what was happening.

Even though I later found and recovered my precious data - deep in the bowels of their “deleted folders” - this has been an unbelievable nightmare and not one I hope anyone else has to go through.

Lol, Carbonites unlimited is a misnomer. Sales tactic. Unlimited with limits. It is not about indexing. It is about throttling to restrict bandwidth. Of course they want to sell unlimited accounts, but only one the ones backing up 6-11gb to stay. They are a joke.

Cabonites backup is slow. What is the point of paying for a remote backup if it takes 2-3 years to backup your files?

Mozys restore sucks too. I stumbled across a brand new company called digital backup svcs and they have best upload speeds and real time works, but not unlimited. I talked to the cust svc person over there about better pricing for an unlimited package, they said they dont WANT people backing up the entire netflix dvd catalogue

../rude - hehe, i only have a bunch of dvr recordings


Maybe mozy isnt so bad. Sure that db company was fastest, but they only want users with clearly defined limits.. Mozy doesnt seem so bad, even if the restore is a nightmare.

BTW People mentioning sync programs. I really think the best sync program out there is free. SyncTow from microsofts powertools selection. It can go both directions, can pick things, and its fast.

I use this to sync two work pcs. I setup backup sets to go to a small external HDD. Then run the other set on other pc to take from external and put on pc.

Works really well, and it was 100% free. The paid services seemed to have too many bells and whistles (that you pay for). I just wanted something to move/collaberate/replicate files.

ugh, i spelled synctoy wrong.

i dont know if you allow links, but here it is

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

Count me as a member of the growing community of totally dissatisfied Carbonite former customers.

Like a couple people above, I thought unlimited meant that. And it only does that if you have an incredibly long time to wait. The problem there is that I can create material to be backed up faster than it uploaded.

Next, their fine print as has been observed above suggests they know their product is buggy and unreliable as they have no way to cancel a subscription mid year. The service is not worth a full year for people who have to use the backups they supposedly keep.

Lastly, I needed to to my backups yesterday as my data system suffered a total wipe out. There is no way for me to create my system using Carbonite. Thus the time I put into a backup with Carbonite was wasted. Good thing I had just completed a backup to my local hard drives system a couple days earlier.

Carbonite--if you are reading this: "Your customers are frustrated with you hiding behing fine print and subtle interpretations of vague instructions! AND they are probably not going to be your customers much longer."

I no longer trusts Carbonite and urge everybody to look elsewhere for reliable backups. I had read the critical reviews of Carbonite prior to subscribing and felt I could still make it work for me being a techie type. Sadly I was wrong. Please do not waste your money and your time on Carbonite like I did.

Carbonite used $55 of my money and probably 25 hours of my time to create a false expectation that my data was reliably backed up. That same 25 hours put into copying file manually and storing the DVDs off site in a secure safe place would be much more effective and cost less.

-steve c.

My Carbonite account expires in 7 days, and good riddance. Unlimited? ROFL. I have been trying for two years with Carbonite to backup ONLY my photo files.

Granted, there are a lot of them, but then again, it doesn't take long for an amateur, much less a pro, photographer, to get a total photo count of 200 Gigs.

My Carbonite account kept up pretty well the first year I had it, but when my backup size got up to 200 Gigs and a bit over, Carbonite has been backing up so slowly that in over a year, it has not EVER gotten caught up (even when I was gone for a month and didn't save any new photo files!)

I called them earlier this year and complained, and was told in evasive and devious terms that my problem was probably because I was trying to backup too many files, and I should cut way back to improve backup speed.

Carbonite is not playing straight with the public about the limits on their basic backup service, and for this reason, I am happy to discontinue doing business with them.

Had they been honest and straightforward from the beginning, it probably would have turned out differently, because I would have realized either that their plan would not meet my needs, or that I would have to upgrade service (and cost) to get my backup needs met.

To Mr. Friend, Carbonite's CEO: Change your policy of saying your basic plan is unlimited. Tell people when you start imposing severe backup slowdowns, and maybe you'll be able to keep people like me around.

I’m new to Mozy after having several different issues with Carbonite both in not backing up my data on my laptop so when I went to restore the data wasn’t there, plus other issues of them having serious problems with their affiliate program & me having to suffer because of it.

It took me a while, but finally I got the message that they don’t treat their affiliates well. Long story, very complicated drama that still amazes me till this day & that's after me talking to 2 different people, then a 3rd who's higher up in the company & none of them truly cared. They just gave me reasons that never helped me in the end, rather just covered their butts.

I wasted time promoting their service & lost gawd knows how much money because they didn't inform me that my account was shut down. Oh & I tried to reach Friend & was told I couldn't have his e-mail address.

Anyway, I was really hoping Mozy would be the one. A manager finally got in touch with me after I asked several questions & was just told to search the knowledge base. I was shocked & threatened to cancel.

The manager was nice enough to answer all my questions & even called me & logged into my computer b/c it just couldn’t be done via tickets. I thought everything was backed up properly (to boot, there’s hardly any data on my laptop), so I sent my laptop back, got a new one & tried to restore all my data.

While I can find my word docs no problem, I’m having problems restoring my bookmarks from Fx & he refused to help me restore them saying that’s beyond the scope of tech support. So of course something that would take him 5 minutes to do is taking me weeks now b/c after trying to restore it 5 times, I still can’t see them.

Then I realized my photos are now missing.

I’m trying to get help from the Fx forum about what is going on, but I’m wondering now if Mozy even backedup my bookmarks & my TB address book even though I was told it was all backed up b/c that was one of my questions. That might be why the bookmarks folder is showing none of my old bookmarks.

Overall the interface with Carbonite is easier to understand, but of course that doesn't seem to matter b/c of all the other problems I had.

I’m really getting frustrated. It shouldn’t be this difficult. While I’m not a geek, I’ve been working with computers since 1984 & they should design things to it's easy for people to figure out what is going on.

I used to be a HUGE supporter of Carbonite b/c on my desktop it worked great, but then after all the problems with my laptop & their affiliate program, I had no choice but to drop them.

I also realized at that time when doing more research, that their system wasn't backing up QB files, so my bookkeeper lost all her files. I thought she had made a mistake, but then I felt bad b/c it wasn't her, it was Carbonite. Others had complained as well.

It's clear to me that management at Carbonite doesn't care. I told the higher up person I was speaking to that I was dropping Carbonite b/c it never backedup my laptop & he was so disrespectful, he didn’t even bother to write me back & I know he read my e-mail.

One of the reoccurring issues I am reading is that we DON'T know these backup systems AREN'T working until we actually need to restore something. That could be a year or two later b/c most people don't do a restore unless something goes wrong.

Most of us don't have time to monitor what's being backed up & what isn't, & that defeats the whole purpose of the software in the first place.

When someone comes out with a new product, please let us all know. I really need to have my data backed up properly. In the meantime I'll check into the other ones mentioned above.

Thanks

Michelle

My wife is always trying to talk me into subscribing to one of these online backup services for our stuff. Which is better and how safe is your data with them? Have they ever lost a customer's data?

Never mind backup solutions, how about a solution that enables you to integrate backup with real-time work. Ahh..the cloud. Try Dropbox.com. I LOVE them and have NEVER had a file missing or unavailable. Nothing better than peace of mind.

For US customers check out http://wirefly.com/backup. You get an initial 2GB free account, can transfer data from one phone to another and backup a PC. The unlimited offer is $5.99mo. You can have up to 3 devices...4 phones and one PC/laptop or all cell phones. For UK customers there is My Hub. Same basic offer except it supports 3 devices. Site URL: http://my-hub.co.uk

I'm personally not a fan of Mozy either. I have them now and backing up my computer has been a constant hassle. Without fail, it stopped at least once a month and I have to sit with Live Chat for an hour while they remote access my computer and unbreak it.

My favorite right now is Dropbox. Here's a great site that compares the top backup services against each other - http://bestbackupservices.com

I agree about dropBox....simple and reliable with no failures so far.... you won't be disappointed in this one

I had Carbonite. I accidentally overrode an Excel File. Because Carbonite says they back up daily I wasn't overly concerned about getting the file back. I called them the same day and they were unable to find the Excel file. They had engineers working on it so I give them credit for that but the file was lost. It was my understanding that the file should have been able to be restored. I have since found out differently. If it's gone from my computer, its gone from Carbonite. I have since switched to Iron Mountain. Carbonite did refund my money and extended my subscription which was outstanding customer service. Now if their back up system had restored my file I would have stayed. Thankfully I had hard copies of the information and was able to restore it manually.

Hi there,

Great posts and comments. I've used Mozy for a couple of years and it has been great, howver, they just emailed me and said they are changing their unlimited policy. I have around 200GB and it is going to be expensive with Mozy.

I installed the trail 2-week version of Carbonite today. I set it to backup my photos/videos, but it says "some files will be excluded". It seems to selectively pick some JPG's and not others. If I click on the folder properties in windows explorer, it tells me I have 154GB. If I click on the properties through Carbonite, it says I have 60GB.

Is this them limiting the amount of data? Anyone else seen this?

Seems to me that the tweaking that people have to do to get these backup services to work right, both in backing up and restoring properly, is not worth it.
Much easier just to buy a couple of external drives, back up to them periodically and store one or two OFF SITE. That solution seems to work well for me and doesn't cost anything other than time and the initial expenditure for the drives. I keep one or two on-site and two off-site at different locations.

We only had about 100 GB to back up and we never got there with Carbonite! The back up speed is awful. I called customer service to cancel my subscription and they wouldn't even do it! I also asked for my money back on the remainder of the year and they said no to that too. BEWARE: they hid a clause in the Terms for the Free Trial that waive your rights to any kind of a refund ever! Stay away from Carbonite!

Beware of Carbonite! Awful customer service. Stayed on hold for online chat and, after a long wait and when I was number one in cue, was told that there was no one available. I sent an email, but they didn't answer my questions completely - just a boilerplate response. Expires next month; won't renew!:

I used Carbonite and had a system crash. I bought a new computer and restored to it. It brought over 1700 files but some files I really needed were not there. I called Carbonite and the girl was pretty rude about it, saying it was essentially my fault. I insisted on talking to tech and found out that files I had produced using a well-known music program were not backed up. I don't know if they ever fixed it, but what hacked me off was I lost a lot of work and they tried to blame me. These sservices do not come with instructions.

. Carbonite is awful. I uploaded tons of files, many of which I deleted (was running out of hard drive space). I signed up then moved & didn't have Internet access except by iPhone. They NEVER sent a renewal! Meantime I had health issues, and honestly thought I'd signed up for multiple years so didn't worry about not hearing from them. Well, I found the early emails from them - nothing since 2009 - and emailed them after I logged in and it said I never downloaded it. Huh?! Customer service then blithely tells me all my files are gone because the subscription lapsed.

Now, wouldn't you think they'd try emailing me, my email hasn't change in a decade, and I got their other emails.

Obviously they don't care, and can't be bothered to contact their (now former & never again) customers.

CARBONITE SUCKS

Carbonite does not have an external hard drive backup option and their support response is very slow.

The catch with Carbonite is that they only allow you to download so much from them when your system goes down. So say you can only get 100gb/month but you have 1tb of data - you have to pay to access at that extra data in the same month that your computer goes down. Carbonite tech support told me this directly.

Hi! I'm a real, real person, not someone paid to inflate one system or bash another. And I HATE Carbonite! (CEO of Carbonite, if you're still reading this, may I please, please have a refund after paying for a three-year subscription because I was seduced by the authority of hearing Ira Glass pitch your product on This American Life??). Backing up on Carbonite was fine and easy. Restoring however, was seven layers of hell, a zillion phone calls and emails to their support (each one of which -- support folks out of India -- had a totally different way of doing it) and in the end, I never got all of my data back. One way of restoring took at least a week and crashed my already fragile PC. I was changing over to a Mac and since you can't restore pc back-up to Mac, I borrowed a BRAND NEW state of the art PC with a ton of memory and super duper fast to do a restore all over again. It kept pausing, restarting, and multiple, multiple problems. In the end, I had to give the PC back after a week. At that time I was missing at least a month of emails. I got so little of my data restored that I wound up using my external HD back-up for the data transfer to the Mac, and just used the PC for transferring the emails (can't transfer emails from an external outlook PC back-up to a Mac). Restore was laborious, slow and painful, confusing, and most of all, in the end, did not work. Carbonite is the worst tech product I've ever purchased. I was a month or so into my three year purchase, and I don't plan to use it again. Oh! Oh! And there is at least one clearly defined limit: They don't back-up your videos. That's right, no videos. It's not a big secret. It's in their promo materials. So even if you want to risk the hellacious restore, make sure you find another spot for your videos.

It's not all ways just about price, try contacting Mozy tech support, email only and from what I've heard can be slow to respond.
http://www.idrive.com/?p=ion_networking has nearly instant phone technical support, comparable pricing to Carbonite and will backup mapped network drives. My experience with Carbonite tech support has been positive as well.

A new question and one Carbonite tech can't seem to answer... Where/how does Carbonite store the data? Specifically: if there is an EMP and my computer is fried, will it be waiting there for me when things are back to normal? I assume my computer will be ruined if it's a "Big One" along with everything else electronic, but I'd hope it would all be recreated eventually. So if I were to survive it all and buy a new computer, will Carbonite have my data ready for me? Just askin'.....

Carbonite is decent price and is unlimited. But is only good if you have under 200 gigabytes. It is not fast. For uploading its 4 to 5 gigabytes a day. Now that I am over 200 gigabytes they slowed my upload to about 1 gb a day. I knew it was going to slow down. They warn you about it. But that is 1/4 the speed it was before. So I need to find something better.

I need to find something different.

I've been a customer of Carbonite for years, and I think many of these reviews are a bit unfair. First off, their customer service has been tremendous. Every time I call them for support, they're friendly and knowledgeable.

Also, my backup is about 350GB rights now and growing. I do computer animation, and just installed a 3TB internal drive, to store my animation dailies and production files.

Is their backup too slow? Probably. But, even I don't believe that once my backup is finished, that I will have more than 1 or 2 GB of file changes each day. Will restoring all this data in the event of a crash be a PITA, probably. But in my fifteen years of using computers, I've never had a complete hard drive failure. I've lost a file here and there, got a virus or two; but never total failure. In fact, I still have hard drives from a PC I owned in 2003 sitting in an enclosure; these I had used frequently before buying the 3TB drive.

Also, do consider that bandwidth costs money. I believe their "excessive use" policy has more to do with how long your backup takes, than how big it is. But until it happens to me, or I hear from an actual customer that got an actual email/contact from Carbonite, saying they exceeded their "unlimited" backup; then I will agree with you. More than likely, that disclaimer is more for their legal liability protection, than anything else.

Regarding bandwidth and speed, your ISP doesn't give you a sustain upload speed (unless you pay extra for it). So even though my upload speed at TWC are 1.5mbp/s, I rarely see that. And it's actually kinda nice that Carbonite doesn't interview with my web browsing or MMO-playing. Though I do wish Carbonite had a "max my bandwidth" option, for when I'm idling my PC.

But overall, their customer service and unlimited backup is why I remain a customer. And that's my two cents on it.

I have both Mozy and Carbonite services running on 2 different systems. I can share my experience with both.

On my laptop I have Carbonite. My current laptop is actually a replacement when my orginal laptop that I installed Carbonite died. Used Carbonite to restore my files onto my new computer. I did not have any problems at all doing this, and within a couple days had everything from my old laptop onto my new one. As is the case with backup services they back up your files, and not your programs. You will need to install your programs but that is par for the course. I do not have a lot of music or video files, but I am in marketing so I have a tons of photos and marketing pieces. I would say the initial backup on my original laptop took about 3.5 weeks. After the initial backup Carbonite only saves the new stuff so as long as your are connected to the internet it is backing up your stuff and keeping it up to date. If that's not happening you should check your settings! Carbonite also offers color coded dots on your files--green means it is backed up and orange means it has not backed up, so it is easy to keep an eye on that. I do know people who have had problems restoring their system with Carbonite but since I was not there to witness the problem I cannot testify if it is a legit beef with Carbonite. But in my case I had no problems at all. I have found the remote access is convenient to use as I can be on any computer and grab a file if needed.

I purchased Mozy for my desktop because I had an external drive(permanently attached). I was initially thrilled with the service, but a couple months in I began receiving error messages stating that it did not backup that day. I would manually go in and try to back it up then, but I would say about half the time that failed. Then I got the notice that they were starting to charge on a sliding scale and my price jumped from 4.99 to 11.99 a month. I wouldn't have minded the price change so much if I could count on reliable back-ups but it is failing more and more. The message today on my account is "An attempt 24 days ago was incomplete. 1 files 4.0 GB awaiting backup." It is troubling if my systems hasn't been backed up for 24 days, and equally as troubling that I know that I do not have a single file that equals to 4 gb. Since I have not gotten this message in the last 23 days I want to assume the 24 days in a mistake, but I cannot verify that. Again the remote feature is nice to have, but given the price increase since I began using it and the repeated error messages I am beginning to consider moving elsewhere. I've never had to restore using Mozy so I cannot speak as to the use of process, but it did take close to 2.5 months for my initial backup, with only having 44GB more than on my laptop.

As some people have mentioned Dropbox is a handy tool. I use that to exchange files with several of my clients. It has an ease of use advantage over both Carbonite and Mozy but it is a different animal. A couple of my clients forget that an item has to be saved in Dropbox (and not a random file on their computer), but that is user error. For tech minded people this is a non-issue but for people who aren't as knowledgable this could be a problem. I also find for myself that monthly price of Dropbox makes it a great deal pricier to get the storage I would need. It is ideal for people though that want to easily share files between computers and who may have a small amount of files to back up.

I have a complaint about Carbonite's Anywhere access. It has never worked for our office. We have most of our data in one folder. Apparently there is a size limit for folders. (They wouldn't tell be or didn't know that limit though!).

So even though the backups are working, we cannot use the anywhere access that they tout without limitations.

Very frustrating

I used the free version of Mozy & then upgraded to the paid version to get more storage. I will NOT extend when my contract is up. Last winter, it just quit working - no backup for almost a month & I was not able to get any help from them. I finally got it working.

Then I discovered a few days ago that my computer had not backed up for almost 2 mo. I tried everything to get it to work & nothing. I finally reached someone on an on-line chat. It seems that there was an software upgrade almost 2 months ago that apparently did not work successfully on my computer. But, I got no message that the upgrade didn't work or that there was any problem. It just stopped backing up & apparently there software doesn't have any sort of notification in it to let the user know if the backup has failed. But, of course that wasn't told to me when I subscribed.

I was told by the person that it is my responsibility to check Mozy EVERY day to make sure the back-up is still working, which is crap.

Fortunately, I also back up to a hard drive daily and Apple is nice enough to tell me if the back-up fails or if there is a problem.

Calling from France.

Unlimited is a claim, and it's absolutely NOT true.

1/ Carbonite will only backup files on your primary hard disk hence limiting the volume and telling me how to organize my files. Therefore NOT unlimited.

2/ MozyHome is NOT unlimited. There is a limit at 50Gb. And no unlimited plan.

The only unlimited I know of is Backblaze. Except it won't work on my old PPC file server which is the storage center and the only machine I want to backup...

I have been with Carbonite for about 4 years and have been impressed on the whole. Currently at 100GB. I had to resore 100GB about a year ago following disk failure. It took a few days, but I was very pleased.

The down side: privacy. I use a unqique email alias as my acccount ID (as I do for all institutions). In September I started receiving SPAM to my Carbonite email address. It took several reports for them to take me seriously until I received this letter:-

"I’m writing to you because you alerted us that you received suspicious emails to the account you use for your Carbonite correspondence, and this may lead you to believe we broke our hard and fast rule about the privacy of our customers’ email addresses.

So I owe you an apology and a full explanation. We do not sell or share email addresses with anyone. However, we use a supposedly trustworthy email forwarder to communicate subscription-related information with our customers, such as renewal notices and the like. Companies like Carbonite use email forwarders because they have agreements with major firewall and spam filter vendors that insure that these emails get through to you.

In this case, the email forwarder that we use grossly misappropriated our customer email list. Needless to say we are taking the appropriate actions with this vendor and I trust that you will never hear from them again.

The vendor has assured us that our customer email addresses are being completely removed from their systems. You may have already noticed the unusual spam has stopped.

The only thing that happened here was that this vendor spammed you. They never had anything more than your email address, so your personal information was not compromised in any way and this in no way affects your backup. We continue to actively monitor the situation as we consider this a very serious matter.

I sincerely apologize for this incident and hope that it did not cause you any serious inconvenience. If you have any questions about what happened, please do not hesitate to contact me."

For this reason I will not be renewing in January and will happily pay more with a trustworthy provider.

Please advise how to get customer support from Mozy or how to file a complaint against the company. I've been trying to restore from Mozy for almost two weeks. I finally paid about $150 to have backed-up data from two computers physically shipped to me. Instructions were inscrutable - by geeks for geeks - not for regular people like me (I've been using Apples and PCs since 1982). Turned out that the decryption software Mozy sent was incompatible with my mac OSX 10.7.2. Couldn't reach Mozy. Live chat shuts down every time (approx. 20 times to date). Finally took the whole mess to a tech support guy at my own expense. He was able to install working software, but decryption key supplied by Mozy worked for only one of the two backed up computers. Two days since Mozy acknowledged that we need another key, but no key, no response, no way to reach the company.(

What can I do?

Following on my from comment about switching allegience, the downside is the time taken to create a new backup with the new provider!

So your existing provider sort of has you over a barrel, so to speak.

Maybe the most flexible option is to manage it yourself and forget on line backup service providers!

Carbonite claims "No file left behind." Not so. After 8 months, it still has not completed my initial backup. Its tech support is actually quite funny--send them a question, and they will reply with something completely unresponsive, over and over. It's as if they don't even read your questions. Ask for a supervisor, and you get another non-response. I have small wmv files under My Documents, and Carbonite says "Files of this type are not backed up." I've sent them screen shots, and the staff has no reply. I would not recommend Carbonite if you actually want to be sure files are backed up. You might think they are, but you they may not be--or you might have to wait almost a year for your initial backup to finish. So, be careful if you feel your files are important.
So, bottom line: if the initial backup takes almost a year, and files that should be backed up are not (such as tiny wmv files under My Documents, then you obviously will not be protected if your computer crashes before the backup is finished, in other words, if your computer crashes within the one-year Carbonite subscription period.

I recommend Iozeta for online backup. They offer unlimited online storage. I've been using their service without any problems.

Sometime last year Mozy quit doing unlimited backups for the $4.95 rate. I had 350 GB backed up with them. My new rate was going to be over $200 a month. So I switched to Carbonite. Since I could backup that much data for $30 a month using Amazon S3, I didn't see then point of staying with Mozy. And at $60/year, Carbonite was still the right choice.

I liked Mozy better. It seemed to back up faster and it seemed to use less resources. However, for about $60 a year I am backing up 350 GB.

I had read someplace that data over the initial 100GB is throttled at a much lower rate. It is large enough that if I backup more than a couple of Gigs, it will take more than a full day.

I don't seem to have much control over when files are backed up. The smaller ones are backed up first and then the larger ones. I'd love to be able to designate some files as being more important than others and have them back up first (e.g. Financial records)

Bob

I have seen the top of the mountain... And it is good.

I stopped wasting my time with Carbonite and Mozy
and switched to BackBlaze.

Great service. True Unlimited backup of
all your data for the PC and Macs.

Do the homework and you will see for yourself.