Anyone tried to combine Carbonite and Windows Live Mesh? I'm keeping my desktop and laptop syncronized with Live Mesh. I've got more data than the Mesh will allow so I primarily use it to sync and not store. I been thinking of then using Carbonite to back up the files on the desktop so that I have a third copy of my file.

 Anyone see any problems with that? I suppose I could make a local external disk image. Try the combo and restore from that if there is any problem.

Thoughts, Thanks.

Steven

I really like Carbonite, but got quite frustrated recently. At some point in time, you could choose to backup "extra" file format, like "avi" and "wmv". I do take videos of my kids & other stuff, and I want them to be backed up. Since I offload my photos on a regular basis, worst case scenario the backup of the new videos takes a day.

 It seems that Carbonite changes recently (last year). I had >150 GB of data back up, now I'm back <90 GB? I found that the backup of ALL my VIDEOS got LOST! I need to manually specify which files to back up... And when a new videos comes, I need to manually specify the video files. (Oh, maybe it's also related to the fact that I changed from 2x250GB Raid0 to 2x500GB Raid 0 that the backup was lost).

Anyways, for me Carbonite is no longer "set it & forget it", and I seriously consider moving away from it. I just need to find an adequate replacement - or maybe the software will be updated with all the complaints...

 Steve

I Agree with Ron Eberhart, Carbonite has a great idea, but falls far behind in customer service, I played email tag with multiple representatives, having to tell my story over everytime, it took about 2 weeks and 10 or so emails to get the answer I was looking for, and in the end they did NOT answer my question or apologize for the WRONG information their reps were telling me, they just enabled the remote file access feature for me, I found out by logging into my account that the feature was enabled after all my emails. YES UPLOAD is SLOOOOOOOOWWWW, rediculous slow, I can upload about 5-6 GB a day to ftp or file hosting sites, Carbonite restricts the upload speed to about 20-25 kbs, SUX!, I have uploaded 784 MB in about 12 hours so far today, If I could find a better file host I would use them   I have been looking at www.Livedrive.Com  anyone heard anything about this site?

Agree with Paul and Ron.  I've had Carbonite for a couple years, and been happy. But recently crossed the 200GB threshold. They claim my upload speed is now 100kbps.  I'm seeing more like 10-15 kpbs. It's painsfully slow. Does anyone have a better option for online backup of large drives?  Does mozy throttle down speeds the same way?  It's crazy.  I'd happily pay more for higher backup rate (just for the convenience of it all), but Carbonite won't even let you do that. 

My concern is that I now have XP as my platform. If I back up files from XP and later I have to change to a new computer with Windows 7, will the backed up files on Carbonite transfer all the files to the new computer? What happens to programs that are no longer supported by Windows 7 platform?

Bill

I subscribed to Carbonite after paying 0 to recover data from the second external drive to crash on me in six months. It was a necessary evil, since years of work, photo, fonts and other resources were stored on that drive, and I kept on running into brick walls to remind me, "Oh yeah, that file was stored on my toasted drive...). So I bit the bullet and payed for the data recovery, putting all the files onto yet another external drive (for the record, NEVER by a Western Digital drive! Mine was one of many the recovery service has had to restore, and the mangled corpse of mine wound up being a "donor" of parts for somebody else's WD drive which had mechanical failure). So I finally heeded my finance's long-running, nagging advice and hooked up with Carbonite, which came highly recommended by the data recovery guys and several other tech-savvy friends. That was on June 24. The download and installation was fast and easy, as was getting it set-up and running... And running... And running... Three weeks later, my status shows that Carbonite has 28% of my files backed up (62.7 GB done, 156 GB to go). I'm relieved to see that this seems to be par for the course. But it doesn't seem to be that much of a drain on my system, and I'm more than willing to put up with a month of uploading to ward off the possibility of all losing my files again, and happy that the program is pretty much self-maintaining about backing up my new files as I go. So to sum up my short story running long: Yes, Carbonite is slow if you have many gigabytes of data to back up, but the security and ease of use is priceless. *BTW, if you live in the Sacramento area and need data recovery, the guys at Konicom are awesome: www.Konicom.Com

-reply by miaxara

After seeing Carbonite advertised on TV, I decided to give it a try tonight on my Macbook Pro.   My wife and I are both looking for a quick and easy solution.   iBackup is too spendy for the amount of data we need to backup.   Carbonite seemed reasonable given it was unlimited and if you kept it under 200G, things moved along nicely.

I was plenty pleased with the interface.   It was easy enough and seemed to work. I use MRTG to graph my bandwith here at home and am seeing about 17-25kbs upload as my backup is being sent up. At that rate, I could have backed it up to any other FTP host much quicker. When important files are being added all the time to our computers, I can't wait a week for it all to get there.   I actually went Googling "carbonite slow upload" and found this site. I figured I didn't have something on the firewall configured properly or something because I can NOT explain the upload speed being slower than YELLOW snot.

After reading the above posts, I am not going to be continuing with Carbonite.   If the upload speed issue was resolved, I'd love it and be happy. But hearing someone have to go through THAT degree of customer service disgrace, getting nowhere, being told "all is fine" with NO resolution...That is absolutely unacceptable in business.     I will be checking back here - perhaps we can all jump on the same boat if someone finds something reasonable that simply "works".

Although Carbonite allows for virtually unlimited storage, the caveat is, they limit the speed in which you can send them data.  The beauty of this is, in effect, your storage is limited merely by the fact that the upload is soooo slow.

Some will say its your Internet connection that is the weak link, perhaps thats the case if you are still using a dialup service, but odds are, its Carbonite.

I'm not saying Carbonite isn't a service some should subscribe to, I'm just not saying its the silver bullet and you might consider a multi-tiered approach.

I for one, push data to Live Mesh 2011 (you get 5GB free) and its really quick.  Then in turn, I sync my other larger files above and beyond that 5GB to an external drive which I also keep on my hard drive (in this case a laptop).  I then use Carbonite to back all of those sources up as I think the Carbonite subscription fee is fairly inexpensive.

Overall, what I dislike is, it just takes too long to upload my files to Carbonite so I need to leave my laptop on at night and right now I'm in an initial backup stage on a new laptop and even though I have a fiber based Internet service with speeds approaching 100MB on a sustained basis, this service seems to creep along <sigh>.

You think it's frustrating to complete your backup? Just wait until you need the backed up info. I had to restore a drive recently and found it less aggravating to restore a 6 month old disk image than wait for Carbonite to restore my files.

-reply by George

Replying to tansqrxI would have to disagree that there is nothing better than Carbonite. Www.Absorb.Com will actually send out a little box that controls all of your remote backups. Not only is that way more secure than opening up ports on your network to push updates, its another local copy of your data. That way if you have a local issue with hardware failure you can download your data locally without having to handle a huge online download for days.

-reply by Commander