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. (more…)