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."

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.

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.

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!

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.