I have or should say had been a Carbonite user for almost an year but issues after issues finally got to me and the lack of new features that were long promised but never delivered forced me to start looking at the automated online backup again and I am so glad I did, as I've found Mozy. I've had numerous problems with Carbonite and their customer service was crappy. So I decided to give up on Carbonite even though I had already pre-paid for 2 years – I guess it's better to lose $80.00 than all your data.
Mozy is similar to Carbonite in some regards but has a much richer feature set that makes it a better offering. Like Carbonite, Mozy installs a small client on your Windows XP/Vista or OS X desktop that runs in the background and backs up files over the Internet using your broadband connection. But that's where the similarities end. Carbonite is a fairly bare-bones offering which may be ok for most novice users but Mozy offers several configuration options like creation of backup sets, file versions, access to your files via the web and many other features.
One of the best and most important feature that set Mozy and Carbonite apart is the fact that you can actually get your backed files back. Wow! What a concept – I know I know. When I first installed Carbonite, I did several test restores and they worked fine but when I had been backing up for several months and really need to restore something, Carbonite let me down. Mozy on the other hand has never done that. Another awesome feature of Mozy is that fact they don't really throttle your bandwidth after you've uploaded 50 GB. Carbonite seems to limit upload bandwidth to about 2 GB a day and then throttle it down after you reach 50 GB. Mozy doesn't seem to play any of those games and allows uploads that are supported by your bandwidth. On an average day, I think I was uploading about 5+ GB.
Another recent event that makes Mozy even more attractive to me is the purchase of Berkeley Data Systems, providers of Mozy online backup by EMC Corporation. As you probably know, EMC is the leader is the storage market and owns Documentum, VMWare, and RSA among other technology companies.
So if you are looking for a great, reliable and affordable backup solution for your home computer, you should check out Mozy.
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Apparently Carbonite for the Mac is due "mid-2008″; I'm hoping that really does mean sometime soon (or that I can get into the beta!), since Mozy has now decided to ignore my file exclusions and try to back up my 30 Gb Parallels hard drive image. This, of course, means it's now a week since my last Mozy backup with no certainty of ever completing another. Between that, the unexplained failure and the lack of reply from Mozy support, I'm about ready to jump ship somewhere.
James,
To sign up for the Carbonite Mac beta, send a note to beta@ carbonite.com with "MAC BETA" in the subject line and you'll be added to the list. You should hear something from our beta team within a few days after your message is received. (Any other Mac users, feel free to do so also!)
Sincerely,
Len Pallazola
Manaager, Customer Service Systems
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com
I'm trying to restore my files from Carbonite. It's been almost a week now and I still don't have my files back!
I signed up for Carbonite a week ago and suspected that they throttle the speeds. Then I found this blog entry. It looks to me like it's capped t about 2.5GB a day. I have 5mbps upstream. I was able to upload 1.5GB in the first four hours and at the end of 24 hrs it had uploaded 2.6 GB. Hard to believe they are not throttling.
Whats the point in having a backup service if you can't back things up fast enough.
Vinodh: There's no daily cap. I think what you're seeing is just the normal allocation of our bandwidth among the many computers that are trying to send data at the same time. Also, if you touch your keyboard or mouse, Carbonite slows down automatically in order to stay out of your way while you're working. If your computer is idle, it will back up faster. If you use your computer, the rate at which data is transferred will drop until you stop using it.
Dave Friend, CEO
I have discovered that Carbonite will not backup Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS) databases. I cannot get Carbonite to automatically backup files that VSS keeps creating with the ".a" extension. Apparently there are a number of files of a certain extension type that Carbonite will not automatically backup.
I have contacted Carbonite about this a number of times and they just keep responding that I should right click on the file to have it backed up. Of course you can always right click on a specific file and have it backed up, but to have to go into my VSS database everyday looking for files with ".a" extension that are not backed up and have them backed up manually is not a real backup system. Obviously they are not reading my email message.
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