A few months ago I decided that I needed to add an offsite option to my backup plan (I use the amazing CrashPlan+ to backup everything to my home server but what if my server gets stolen or bursts into fire?). To solve my problems I went looking for an offsite “in the cloud” backup solution. I considered Mozy, Carbonite, DropBox, CrashPlan+offsite and iDrive. Right away I had to toss out DropBox, CrashPlan Offsite and iDrive, to backup the volume of data I had I would be paying in some cases more than $1000 dollars a year.
So this left Mozy and Carbonite and I decided to give Carbonite a try first.
The first week with Carbonite was great. The backup speed was awesome. Carbonite was installed on my laptop and plugged into a 10Mbps link, I had all of my data (about 30GB) backed up in a few days if not less (or so I thought, more on that later). I didn’t notice any issues and in general things just seemed to work. I’m a big fan of simplicity when it comes to backup software. I don’t need a lot of options, I just want it to backup everything I tell it to and not bother me. (CrashPlan does this really really well btw).
After about a week with Carbonite on my laptop I decided to install it on my home server. At home I had a 512KBps upload speed (Comcast) but that was still pretty good. Again no issues and it seemed like it was backing everything up so I was happy. By the time my trial was about to run out things were still flying along so I decided to buy Carbonite.
At this point I was traveling a lot so I didn’t get a chance to check out my home server for 2 weeks, I assumed when I got home I would find hopefully most of the backup finished. When I did finaly check my server I found that it had backed up about 170GB but now seemed to just barely moving along. Whats more, this time I looked a little closer and noticed that the amount waiting to back up didn’t add up to the amount of data I had on my drives.
Performance Issues Emerge
I started with the performance issue. It looked like I was uploading at about 128Kbps, I thought maybe my provider had throttled me down but other uploads flew at ~512Kbps. Next I thought maybe Comcast was specificly throttling Carbonite. I had AT&T DSL as a backup at the time which I switched over to but no luck, still the same speed issue. Not sure what was going on, I decided to put that issue on hold while I went and figured out why all my files were not in the backup queue. What I discovered started to really worry me.
Not all my files were being backed up!
I found that Carbonite has a file blacklist that blocks specific file types from being uploaded. No where does Carbonite tell you this, nor is this blacklist available in the UI, you have to go searching for it on the web. Carbonite does not release this information easily, you have to request it. Look closley at that list of excluded files BTW, you will notice that .key files are blocked. My server is a PC but my laptop is a Mac where I use Keynote, guess what file extension is used by Keynote? Yep, I found that none of my presentations (as of April 2009) had been backed up, this could have been a disaster.
So I decided this was a good time to try Carbonite support, I wanted to know how to turn off this blacklist and backup ALL of my files. This was an unlimited backup right? Unfortunately Carbonite support was not too helpful. There was no way to turn off the blacklist and if I wanted to backup my Keynote files, I would have to remember to right click on each one and mark it to be backed up. Thats strike #1.
I dug in more and found that none of my VMware images and ISO images were being backed up. (I don’t keep any CD’s or DVD’s, even data CD’s laying around, when I buy software I immeditly make a backup copy and put the orginal in storage) – Strike #2.
Back to the performance issues
Customer support is often the most overlooked yet the single most important thing a company can invest in. Unfortunately for Carbonite, this is where my experience with their customer support put the final nail in the coffin on Carbonite for me. Strike 3, your out.
So what happened? I started my conversation with Carbonite on 5/28, here is a rough summary and timeline. Check out how many different support people I talk with over 2 weeks, at no time during this exchange does anyone actually help me troubleshoot the real problem!
5/28: Me -> Carbonite: Backup is slow.
5/30: Carbonite (Shirley) -> Me: It’s your Internet connection, we benchmark against our competitors and we know we are the best
5/31: Me ->Carbonite: It’s not my connection, I have two, and they both won’t upload fast to Carbonite. In 47 days I’ve backed up 238 GB, but at the current rate it will take almost 60 days to backup the remaining 57 GB, WTF? I want a refund.
6/1: Carbonite (Shirley) -> Me: We don’t give refunds, you agreed to our terms of use, and you got to try before you bought, so it’s your fault.
6/1: Me -> Carbonite: Seriously? You are telling me this is all my fault because I agreed to the terms of service? How about actualy helping me with the problem I reported: It’s slow now, it was lightning fast during the trial! (I cc’d David Friend, CEO of Carbonite on this e-mail)
6/2: Carbonite (Thomas) -> Me: David asked me to contact you, please send us the Carbonite log files and we will try and help (This is done silently BTW when you submit a customer support request via the Carbonite application!)
6/2: Me->Carbonite: Here are my logs.
6/4: Me -> Carbonite: I sent you the logs a few days ago, did you get them yet?
6/5: Carbonite (Shane) -> Me: No, we didn’t get them, can you do it again?
6/5: Me->Carbonite: Here are my logs…again.
6/5: Carbonite (David R.) -> Me: We benchmark against our competitors, we know we are the best BUT we might make tradeoffs and allocate bandwidth differently across our customer base. (Um where did this response come from? Out of the loop David?)
6/13: Carbonite (Maggie) -> Me: We got your logs but there is no request, what help do you need? (I was instructed to only put the ticket number in my request)
6/13: Me->Carbonite: Are you guys a bunch of idiots? The ticket number is in the request, why don’t you go look it up?
6/15: Carbonite(Maggie) ->Me: “+ADw-html+AD4APA-head+AD4APA-style type+AD0AIg-text/css+ACIAPg-p +AHs-margin-bottom: 0+ADs- margin-top: 0+ADsAfQA8-/style+…” (this is the actual first line of a ~200 line e-mail I received from them)
6/15: Me->Carbonite: Wow, you guys are hopeless. You just sent me a bunch of jibberish. Any chance you might help me with my problem now?
6/15: Carbonite(Rosanne)->Me: Hi, Jeff Robison, VP of customer care asked me to contact you. Sorry about that e-mail, one of our senior Mac technicians will contact you (Ummm, yes, but the computer i’m having issues with is a PC?)
6/15: Carbonite(Marshall)->Me: It looks like yesterday things were working but have stopped. Are you using time machine? Do you use WiFi? I will be handling this case from here on out.
6/15: Me->Carbonite: Ummm, the computer i’m having issues with is my PC not my Mac and BTW, I just rebuilt that system from scratch and reinstalled everything to make sure you have a clean environment. Oh and it’s on Gigabit ethernet.
6/16: Carbonite(Marshall)->Me: Please restart your computer, Carbonite hasn’t established a connection since the 14th
6/16: Me->Carbonite: Are you SURE about that? It’s backed up 0.4 GB in the last 24 hours and Carbonite is reporting it’s backing up right now. I’ll restart, but I think the information you have is wrong. Again, I have a PC.
6/16: Carbonite(Marshall)->Me: Did you just upgrade to Mac OS 10.5.7 recently? I am still not seeing any connections.
6/16: Me->Carbonite: Seriously? Are you reading my e-mail? I said I HAVE A PC.
And that was the last I heard from them…I uninstalled Carbonite from all my computers today.
The Verdict
If you have a lot of data and consider yourself a “Power User” stay away from Carbonite. Seriously, would you trust a company like this with your data? Hidden restrictions and horrible customer service are bad enough if you are talking about regular software. When you are talking about a service that has all your data and manages it remotely it’s out of the question.
As a side note, I think the limitations that Carbonite has made to their service are likely acts of desperation to control their bandwidth costs and I doubt they saw bandwidth as gating issue when they put their business model together. With storage cheap and CPU perforamnce plentiful the one remaining bottleneck to the adoption of cloud computing and “in the cloud” services is bandwidth. If I’m right and cloud computing continues to grow the ramifications on the computing industry will be more far reaching than anyone has perdicted with ripples that could restart the telecom industry. This is deffinitly a topic for future research.
As for offsite backup, I just wish the price would come down on CrashPlan+ and their offsite option.
Update: I just received the following e-mail from Carbonite Support:
6/21:Carbonite(Pam) -> Me: “+ADw-html+AD4APA-head+AD4APA-style type+AD0AIg-text/css+ACIAPg-p +AHs-margin-bottom: 0+ADs- margin-top: 0+ADsAfQA8-/style+AD4APA-/head+AD4APA-body bgcolor+AD0AIgAj-ffffff+ACI- style+AD0AIg-background: +ACM-ffffff+ACIAPgA8-br+AD4- +ADw-font size+AD0AIg-2+ACIAPgA8-div style+AD0AIg-width:100+ACUAOw-word-wrap:break-…..”
It just keeps on getting better and better!
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“+ADw-html+AD4APA-head+AD4APA-style type+AD0AIg-text/css+ACIAPg-p +AHs-margin-bottom: 0+ADs- margin-top: 0+ADsAfQA8-/style+…””
I sense a new header for all e-mails from here on out.
Seriously, give Mozy a shot. I’ve had good luck with it thus far.
I had heard that the online companies that sell “unlimited” storage for a few bucks a month have a quiet method of shepharding big consumers toward the door. Perhaps you’ve captured the signature of that method.
I can confirm that Carbonite has a policy of limiting your bandwidth for uploads to its online backup service – once you exceed certain limitations.
Carbonite does not list these limitations. Instead, it continues to advertise that it is unlimited, when it well knows that its upload limitations make the service far from unlimited.
Asking Carbonite customer service results in conflicting responses. Buyer beware!
It is interesting that basically your uploads stopped at 170 GB – the exact same point where mine stopped. It is clear that Carbonite backup is not unlimited.
From other online posts, it is clear that it provides refunds to these high storage users as this is the simplest and cheapest way for it to get rid of these problem and costly customers.
Carbonite is NOT unlimited and it should stop advertising that it is. Time for a class action I’d say!
David Friend from Carbonite here.
I would like to set the record straight on our bandwidth policy. There is no limit on backup size — Carbonite does not stop at 170GB or any other number. We have many users with far more than 170GB backed up.
Neither we nor any other backup company has unlimited bandwidth, however. Further, we cannot allow some user with an extremely fast connection (such as FIOS) to hog all our inbound bandwidth, thereby depriving other users of a good experience. I think if you run tests on Mozy or any other backup service, you will be able to observe bandwidth limits.
Anybody who tells you that they do not have a bandwidth allocation policy either has very poor engineering or is allowing a small number of very large users grab bandwidth at the expense of many average users.
Of course, as the blog points out, if you are willing to spend $1000 a year instead of $55 a year, you can switch to a vendor that can afford to offer far more bandwidth per user. For about 97% of our users who have residential speed DSL or cable, they would see zero difference for the money, however.
Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
David, thank you for the first clear response I’ve received from Carbonite. I agree with you, bandwidth limitations are a necessity of your business and I don’t blame you or any online backup provider for having them. In my first few messages to Carbonite support I asked that if you were in fact limiting me that you tell me what those limits were and adopt a policy of at least letting a full backup finish before you started capping speeds otherwise I haven’t really started getting the full benefit of your service have I? It’s all a moot point though because I have no idea what your policy is, and that’s the real issue.
You combine Carbonites failure to be up front and honest about its limitations and amazingly poor customer service and you have a really unbearable combination. Just read customer support experience in my post, have you ever heard of anything so crazy? My guess is you might be hearing of it all too often these days.
BTW Mozy is no different in regard to bandwidth issues it seems however you post a response to that blog which claims 8mbps upload with Carbonite, this is nowhere near the 128kbps I was getting after Carbonite capped my upload speed.
If Carbonite is going to be successful it’s going to need to earn their customers trust, hidden file blacklists and high speeds during the trial that silently disappear once you start using the service are not the way to do that. I’m happy to help you improve your service if you are willing to listen and try some new ideas, that’s half the reason I contact a company’s customer support in the first place, I want to get help as much as I want to help that company become aware of the problem and have a chance to do something about it. besides, if anyone should know, I should, I’ve been in software product management for almost 10 years, I know what it means to build software and support your customers and what a lot of companies forget is that customer support is not an add on, it’s part of the product you are selling.
So David, I wish you good luck, thank you for your message and I hope that you might take my comments and those of other customers to heart and think about how you can improve your service, if you are willing to give some of my ideas a chance, I’m willing to give Carbonite another chance as well. But for now, it’s as I said: Carbonite is just not ready for the real world.
Thanks, Erik. We certainly didn’t make an effort to hide our black list. There is a call out for it on the welcome email that links to the FAQ on the subject. The fact that you had some trouble finding it means that we need to make it easier to find. We do have a new searchable self-help system that just went live this week, and I’ll be sure it’s very easy to find the black list.
BTW, the black list is not there because we’re trying to cut down on the number of files we back it — I assume you realize that. There are a lot of files in Windows that if restored to a new computer would cause all kinds of problems, especially for our users who tend not to be very computer-savvy. You raise an interesting use-case where you create a file on a mac with a mac extension and then store it on a Windows server. To be honest, I don’t think we considered that possibility. Good catch.
There are a number good improvements to Carbonite that have come from sophisticated users like you, and I hope you’ll pass along your thoughts and ideas. I read all this stuff carefully!
Dave
Wow – another horror story about Carbonite’s support. Why you were bounced from rep to rep, each without reading the entire ticket prior to replying to you, makes no sense to me.
The upload cap is annoying, too. While I’ve previously compared online backup services based on personal experiences, customer feedback, and feature sets, it may be worth testing upload speeds, too. Although testing a service by uploading 2GB of data wouldn’t even find the hidden caps that companies such as Carbonite put on their uploads.
Erik,
I’d like to invite you to give Cucku Backup a try. It’s a p2p backup system with the ability to export a backup to a partner computer (you’ll need a friend or family member with storage to spare). For a 170GB+ data this solves the speed problem – you seed the backup with a HDD transfer and then only need to send new/changed files over the Internet.
Also, our customer support is provided by engineers who know what they’re talking about., we don’t black list files and we support external and network drives in the free version of the product.
If you do give it a try please drop me a line and let me know how you get on.
Rob Ellison
CEO, Cucku, Inc.
A trial Carbonite was installed on a laptop I bought to I decided to give it a try. After a smooth installation and initial backup of my documents and settings, I needed to figure out how to backup my personal files, which are in another folder. The doc tells me to right-click (but not in which application to right-click, so I presumed Windows Explorer) and select the folders or files to backup. But there is no backup action or anything else related to Carbonite when I right-click. Neither do I see any of the colored dots that should be there. My two weeks’ trial is running out in 2 days and support has been totally hopeless. They initially told me to send the log files which I did. They returned a list of complicated instructions about firewalls and antiviruses because they said it seemed not to back up properly. They told me AVAST antivirus was running on my computer even though it’s been disinstalled and there is no trace of it in task manager’s process list. They told me to “disable” Retrospect (which I’ve used so far) without being more precise about what they mean with “disable”. I had to ask a couple of clarification questions to understand what to do. No answer. After 6 days, I received an e-mail asking if I still needed help. Yes. Then I was told it now seemed to back up correctly, so there should be no problem. So how do I back up my files outside documents and settings? Reply: Copied and pasted from one of their checklists: Right-click on the file and select the file or folder. If you still need help, send us your log files. YES BUT THERE IS NO SUCH OPTION AND I ALREADY SENT YOU MY LOG FILES. They don’t even read what you tell them but just copy and paste something to get rid of your e-mail in the queue. Thanks for letting others know that it’s not just me, but Carbonite support that is utterly miserable. I’ll remove it. At least I didn’t waste any money. I don’t care if it’s cheap if it doesn’t work and if customer support don’t have a clue what they are doing. I’d rather pay double or triple and get something that works and a competent customer service.
Interesting, I got Carbonite last month, my upload was around 7 gigs a day. Now, that I have uploaded about 200 gigs, the upload is about less than 2 gigs a day. Something tells me I have been ripped off. They announce unlimited then, they cut your upload short. What a crock.
I have no problem with limited space, just tell me ahead what it is. If I would have known this previously, I’d have backed up my most important data then deal with the rest later. Thank you carbonite for letting us know ahead of time. Crooks.
After having scrapped Carbonite, I tried Webroot Antivirus with Antispyware’s new online backup function, given that I already had the program. It didn’t work either. After a lot of exchanges with support and reinstallation after reinstallation (refusing to do any real support unless I disinstalled the English Antivirus and installed the French version, because they claimed an English antivirus wouldn’t work with a French XP – which is total nonsense), they found out that one of the antivirus shields needed to be switched off for it to work. But that would expose my computer to certain types of virus attack. It backed up with the shield switched off, but the backup report showed 0 bytes backed up even though the files were backed up. Next version in autumn 2009 should work, they said. So the present version is apparently a beta version, or at least it behaves like one. At least the antivirus and antispyware protection works like a dream. I dumped the backup function and installed Mozy, which so far has been working like a dream. Of course, the trouble free experience means that I don’t know if support is up to the job
Ugh… I hate reading these stories but am always grateful for the information.
I feel compelled to make a correction, though (I’m not associated with Carbonite in any way).
I was trialing both Carbonite and BackBlaze for my options. I backed up my data fully on both. Then, for the first time since I can remember, my primary notebook (a Mac) crashed and crashed for good. You can bet I was thanking my lucky stars I’d started trying online backup that week!
I’m a keynote speaker by profession, so my Keynote files are, literally, my bread and butter. If I lose those, it would take me months to get them put back together and I’d lose a LOT of money in the process. So they are critical.
Contrary to your experience, Carbonite DID backup .key files just fine. The only problem came when I tried to restore them. I had found a backup notebook — a PC — and decided to restore them to there then see if I could convert them. But, no, Carbonite refused to restore those files — saying something like “You can’t restore your backup from a Mac to a PC.” It wasn’t clear to me if that applied to all files or just .keynote files. (In fairness, Mac stores its files very differently than the PC. Google “mac file package” for info.)
As I mentioned, I did have a second backup running with Backblaze and it restored cross-platform with no problems at all.
So I bailed out on Carbonite and got Backblaze.
Since I bought and paid for Backblaze, though, I have noticed a similar massive slowdown in my upload speed. I says it’s uploading/backing up but the ticker hasn’t really moved at all. In three weeks.
So I guess there’s no perfect solution.
Thanks for the correction Tod, I was a heavy keynote user as well when I first noticed the problem, chances are they fixed it right around the time I noticed it (and reported it) but I stopped using Carbonite shortly thereafter and never had a chance to verify it. I’m glad to hear that Carbonite has addressed it, what a huge disaster that would have been for Mac users!
Your observation about Blackblaze is telling as well. With bandwidth the number one cost for these online backup services, it’s not surprising that many of them limit bandwidth (but for how long? See my post on technology evolution and bandwidth). I just wish they were consistent with it and more importantly, upfront about it. It’s like you went out and bought a sports car and then after 1 month of awesome performance the manufacture sneaks into your house and installs a speed governor.
So we have confirmed reports that Carbonite, Mozy and now Blackblaze all have bandwidth limits that kick in after you have used up a certain amount of bandwidth. To all my readers out there, have you had a similar experience with other services? Let me know!
external HD + safety deposit box = best decision here..
3.5 External HD is too large to fit in most consumer-level safe deposit boxes.
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.
Carbonite
First of all I am a product developer and am intimately familiar with common sense product design. Carbonite is probably just fine for keeping an eye on a few gigs of data on a very small unchanging environment. However…if you have an average amount of data and you change them on occasion you might want to just use a backup drive.
Believe it or not Carbonite is a resource hog even when disabled! That's right Carbonite will be at the top of your services window even when put into pause or disable mode! Where Carbonite really fails to deliver is in servicing files that change over time like word docs, graphics, etc. Upon installation Carbonite will scour your system looking for files to protect. While its performing this initial backup process it completely ignores previously scanned files that since changed! In other words common sense would dictate that Carbonite would monitor pre-scanned files for any changes but no it ignores the changes until it backs up your entire system! If you have a larger than average system it could take several weeks for Carbonite to service items from the initial scan! I kid you not. Then once you have a fully covered system Carbonite will only log one update per file per day! If you are just a casual user and write a document or two a day you will be allowed one whole backup per day. I don't know about you but I need a little more from a backup. Carbonite should deploy a priority folder where users can expect regular visits from the Carbonite service routine. And finally…How in the heck can a piece of software that does so little gobble up so much processor and memory resources? My God, I have designed a couple hundred products to date and I have never seen such bloated and inefficient software, ever. This product is a kludge and needs to be scrapped and designed by someone who knows what they are doing.
I am absolutely frustrated with Carbonite. After one month of having installed it it still has just got to 50% of my initial backup. Plus many files are not included (blackout list) and there is no recursive way to force those files into the backup list. This is a poor software and absolutely unuseful for today's customer needs. I would join anyone in class-action suing Carbonite. The technical support mentioned they would not refund me unless the product is defective. They should mean "the service" to be defective, as it is the service to be instructing the installed client to do nothing while they strugle in their infrastructure's capacity. CRAPONITE !
Hm.. I had a minor issue early on in my Carbonite experience, and I found their customer service to be utterly useless. It took the intervention of a "higher up" to actually answer my question, after I complained about how rude and unhelpful the original CS person was.
Today I've discovered that Carbonite has gone banannas. The little beach ball of death comes up if I try to hover over its icon, and if I cancel the processes using activity monitor – they just respawn – complete with the beach ball of death. Also through doing this I learned what a resource hog it is. And finally – I've had the service for MONTHS now and it's still not completed a full backup of around 80 gigs.
Sad to hear other people have had similar issues with their support.
My hard drive crashed two days ago. I have spent those two days fighting with the Carbonite software (as a 20+ year near expert in PC/Windows). It is finally restoring my files. It will take about 6 weeks to restore my 450 gigs of files.
Unfortunately, it will not allow me to prioritize the process, so my irreplaceable family photos and files representing about 10 years of work languish while it stupidly restores old install packages or other non-vital stuff.
Yes, I've tried to chat with customer support. No response. Yes, there is a function to select and proritize your restore, but the buggy software uses 100% CPU time and then does nothing. The only function that works is the "restore everything" button — which is my last, desperate hope.
Using Carbonite is false security, and unless you know a whole lot about computers, will probably be impossible when the "Sugar hits the fan."