I tried Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com) first because I heard about it on a podcast. Jungle Disk is a software interface to the Amazon S3 servers (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/) which is basically open storage. You can store anything on S3 (backups, web pages, and anything else you can think of) and pay for the bandwidth plus a small fee per gigabyte. My basic backup is 100+ Gb so I quickly started to run into higher than expected fees from Amazon S3. I believe if you had a smaller backup footprint (< 10Gb), S3 may be more economical than Carbonite but I am not in that category. Jungle Disk is a great frontend, it’s just that S3 became expensive.
After getting hit with 10+ dollars a month with S3, I tried Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) which I heard about on a national US radio show. The deal is unlimited storage for around 60 USD a year. I tried the free trial (no credit information needed, you just have to create an account) and ran it for about three weeks. I was happy with it and bought a year’s subscription. The downside to the trial is no music, executables, or pictures are backed up.
After purchasing the full package, I was a little leery of the install process. I don’t want to call it intrusive but you can tell a lot of device drivers were installed. Carbonite is closely coupled with the Windows desktop so I am always cautious of software that integrates that deeply with my system. The upshot to this is the client software is rock solid and I can’t remember a single crash or freeze on my system due to Carbonite. Carbonite is also fast and unobtrusive once you have it fully configured. I rarely even notice it is running.
The install process will add a mapped drive into My Computer with its own icon. Another indicator is every file marked for backup has an overlay to its icon in the form of a small circle in the lower right corner. If the icon is green then the file has been backed up, yellow means it’s in the queue. A tray icon runs all the time in the background and you have the option of disabling backup if you need the extra bandwidth.
All data written to the Web is encrypted but you have the option of managing your own encryption key. I opted for managing my own key and during the install process Carbonite had me save a small data file that contained the key. It is clearly explained that backing up the key through Carbonite is not a good idea because you will not be able to access it without the key you don’t have. In light of this I have the key backed up in multiple locations on my external USB hard drive and physical CDs.
One downside to the service is the upstream bandwidth. The website states that a typical residential upload connection is inherently limited and the backup speed and time will be dependent on this. I found this to be twisting the truth a bit because I can easily get 150 Kbit/sec, but the Carbonite upload would max out at around 25 kbit/s. It shouldn’t be surprising that an unlimited storage solution would limit you in some way so I don’t see this as a deal breaker. It took well over a month to fully backup my massive 100+ Gb cache of files. Just remember to select your most important files first and then move onto your music and movie collection.
I admittedly have limited knowledge of all the online backup services but I find it hard to believe there is something better than Carbonite. The main downside is the bandwidth but the main positive of being a solid reliable piece of software far outweighs this. I give Carbonite my recommendation and encourage others to at least try it. If you do decide to purchase you can enter the promotion code “Rush” into the order form and get an extra month free. I suppose my biggest recommendation for Carbonite is this, my one year contract is about to expire and I will not hesitate to renew my subscription.
