Carbonite Review: Unlimited Online Backup for all your files

Updated: 13.04.2012

Who is Carbonite online backup for?

Carbonite is one of the easiest online backup services that you can find on the Internet. Whether you are an experienced tech fanatic online dude or if you recently got your first computer, you will love Carbonite for its ease of use. If you don’t want to have to worry what kind of data to back up or how much storage is available, then Carbonite online backup will be a perfect fit because it offers unlimited online backup. Many experts as well as customer reviews note that Carbonite online backup is the go-to solution for all their online storage and backup needs. Also, Carbonite offers a free trial so that you can test this service and see if it fits your needs.

Carbonite online backup review

Are you a Star Wars fan? Then you certainly know what Carbonite is. Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, is frozen in Carbonite in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Carbonite backup uses this metaphor to show one of their core competences: online backup security. Nobody except yourself will be able to access your data, just as nobody was able to access Han Solo in his Carbonite compound.

Security is of utmost importance when it comes to files that you have to backup online. Carbonite offers the highest level of security, encrypting your data on their servers as well as giving you a security key so that you are the only person who can access your files, unless you want to share some files with other people, of course. Otherwise, not even Carbonite employees are going to be able to access them.

But security is not the only thing that Carbonite offers. Fast backups are equally important because you cannot afford to lose data while you’re working. So Carbonite stores your files as fast as it does in the Star Wars movie with Han Solo.

And here comes the best part: Carbonite offers a free 15-day trial without the need of a credit card. Therefore, if you are unsure which online backup service to choose, you can try Carbonite without any risk involved. If you like it, great! If you don’t, well, just try another service.

• High level of security
• 15-day free trial

Plans and pricing

Carbonite recently revamped their plans and pricing structure. It offers online backup for personal as well as business use. Some home plans offer advanced features that could be interesting for businesses as well. Home plans start at $59 per year. The standard home plan gives you a subscription for one computer and unlimited backup space. Doesn’t matter if you are a Windows or a Mac user: both operating systems are equally supported. If you are a more advanced home user you are probably interested in the HomePlus plan ($99 per year).
It gives you the opportunity to back up external hard drives or make bare metal backups on another hard drive to be able to restore apps and system files as well.

If you need your restore fast and have huge amounts of data you can opt for the HomePremier plan ($149 per year) which gives you a courier recovery service for free. Unfortunately, the more advanced home plans (HomePlus and HomePremier) do not support Mac operating systems.

If you elect to sign up for 3 years you can save up to 21%. In my opinion, that is absolutely worth it because Carbonite is one of the top online backup providers on the Internet. But as I’ve already said, obviously, it is not perfect. We are going to cover the little flaws in this review, too.

• Backup for as little as $3.80 per month!

• No monthly subscription fee

Carbonite review: first impression and signing up

When I first visited Carbonite.com I fell immediately in love with the easy-to-understand website. I knew exactly where to click to get to my first online backup. When you click on one of the links in this review you will land on a page where you are invited to try Carbonite for free. I highly encourage you to do that and see whether Carbonite fits your needs.
However, in this review and in all the other reviews on Cloudbackuping.com, I always sign up for the paid version to give you a legitimate review of the online backup services. I think there’s nothing worse than all those fake reviews out there where people just copied from one another. So I decided to ignore the beautiful orange “Try Carbonite Home” button, and instead I went right on to the pricing details.

For the purposes of this review I will select the home plan for $59 per year per computer. It’ll give you the possibility to backup all the data you have stored on your PC (except system files and applications) without any hassle. Also, if you’re a Mac user you can download the Mac software as well. Since all Carbonite plans are unlimited plans you don’t have to worry about storage, either. At $59 per year, Carbonite is one of the cheapest online backup services out there.

After introducing my e-mail and password I am forwarded to the payment page. Unfortunately, there is no option to pay with PayPal. So I have to whip out my credit card and type in the 16 digits to make the payment. The payment process works flawlessly and is very secure. You don’t have to worry about clicking through complicated menus and options. Carbonite just wants you to sign up and make your first backup. There is very little upselling done for products I don’t need. Besides: who needs more than unlimited backup?

• Unlimited online backup
• Very easy to use

• No option to pay with PayPal

The backup process

When you install Carbonite backup you are guided through an installation wizard that takes care of all the essential parts of your backup. If you have absolutely no experience with online backup and don’t know where to start it is a good idea to rely on Carbonite’s automatic backup selection.

Carbonite detects the files that you might want to back up on your system. However, you don’t have to use the automatic backup selection when you know exactly where your important files are stored and what files you have to backup.
In the installation wizard you can choose between automatic backup and advanced backup. As you know, I am a geek and I like to fiddle around with things. So I select the advanced option to look at little bit further under the hood. Also, I like the additional security feature which allows me to set up my own encryption key.

After selecting “Advanced backup” I can select the files I want to back up. Again, Carbonite offers to include its default online backup selections such as documents, music, videos, e-mail and other important files. But I want to start from scratch and upload only my test folder (1 GB in size) as I always do to compare the speed of the online backup services.

In the next step I can schedule my online backup. You have 2 options here: you can choose to update your online backup continuously, meaning that Carbonite will automatically detect changes of your files and backup those changes in the background without you noticing anything. Or you can create an online backup schedule where you can specify if you only want Carbonite to back up on certain times during the day. This could be useful if you have a slow Internet connection or an old computer and you want to backup your files while you are at work.

I want my files to be backed up continuously, which is why I selected the first option (which is also the option recommended by Carbonite). Lastly, you can set your encryption key. For the purposes of this review I won’t set it here but I would highly encourage you to set an encryption key and store it in a safe location. You have to make sure you never lose this encryption key because you will never be able to recover your data without it. Not even Carbonite can help, because it is your key and only you know the combination.

The next step confuses me a little bit. I unselected all automatic backups. Carbonite, however, shows me that it will automatically back up my photos, documents, e-mail and music files. Fair enough, but I only want to backup the files of my test folder. I wasn’t able to change that in this wizard. So I click on “next.” And on the next screen I see which files are not automatically backed up, which are videos, executable files, files larger than 4 GB and any external hard drives (only available with HomePlus and Premier). If you want to add files to your backup just right-click on that file and select “Back this up with Carbonite.” That’s easy as pie!

So the wizard doesn’t want me to deselect the files that Carbonite considers important. While this is a very useful feature for beginners it could be a little frustrating for advanced users. After confirming backup for even the unwanted files the wizard starts immediately with the automatically selected files. Any attempts to deselect those files failed. So I have no other option than to wait until everything is backed up.

This procedure is a strong indicator that Carbonite targets beginners and people who don’t want to worry about options and backup preferences. Fortunately, Carbonite gives me a great overview of pending files and how many gigabytes are left to be transferred. This way I can check the time it takes to upload 1 GB and compare it with other providers.

The initial backup usually takes a long time depending on how much data you have to back up and how fast your Internet connection is. In general, you can upload 3 to 4 GB per day. After the initial backup is complete these so-called incremental backups, or continuous backups, will be performed a lot faster because Carbonite only uploads the bits of files that have changed. That saves bandwidth and storage space.

• Dead simple backup wizard
• Automatic file detection
• Incremental backups for best performance

• Little control over initial backup
• Probably a little too restrictive for advanced users

Backup speed and performance

In my extensive experience with online backup services I absolutely love providers that show high performance and backup speed while not slowing down the operating system. As I earn my money with my PC editing audio and video files I absolutely need a backup provider that does not slow down my machine while doing the backups. I’m happy to say Carbonite works just as advertised. During my extensive testing it didn’t slow down my machine at all – even though I was converting an HD video while doing the backup.

Carbonite is speedy

To compare online backup services I always upload 1 GB of files. Those files are audio files, video files and documents. I try to emulate a typical backup scenario the user might face. Carbonite surprised me with tremendous backup performance. It is one of the fastest online backup providersaround. For 1 GB I only needed 1 hour and 15 minutes. That is a lot faster than Mozy, for example.

Carbonite claims that if you have 30 GB of data you will need around 10 days to back up all those files. I think this is a conservative estimate. I am confident that I will have my backup a lot faster than in 10 days.

Small addition to backup speed

Lately, I’ve been getting a couple of complaints about Carbonite’s backup speed of your initial backup. And yes, there is a problem if you have more than 200GB to backup. Let me tell you why:

First, we have to ask ourselves how is it possible for services to provide ALL of their users with unlimited storage and backup? Well, the answer is easy – they don’t have to. The business model is based on a simple “assumption”: more than 98% of the users won’t even backup more than 200GB. So with 2% of the people who backup more Carbonite loses some money, while still being profitable with the other 98% that backup significantly less.

What Carbonite wants is dividing the bandwidth equally for all of its users that’s why they tend to limit the upload speed if you have more than 200GB to backup (or more than 35GB if you’re on the Home plan). That’s why Carbonite is not truly unlimited in every sense of the word. Yes, it’ll provide you with unlimited storage but in some cases you have to be very, very patient until your files are up and running. Let’s have a look at the caps Carbonite issues on the users:

Home Plan

• The first 35GB of data can achieve upload speeds of up to 2 mbps (megabits per second).
• Between 35GB and 200GB of data, upload speeds can reach up to 512 kbps (kilobits per second).
• At 200GB or more of data, upload speeds are limited to around 100 kbps (kilobits per second).

So in the worst cases you face a limit to 100 kilobits per seconds which equals 12.5 kilbyte per second. That is indeed very slow and it would take ages to backup, say, 400GB of data.

Home Plus and Home Premier

Ok, so let’s have a look how that changes with the more advanced plans:

li>The first 200GB of data can achieve upload speeds of up to 2 mbps (megabits per second).
• At 200GB or more of data, upload speeds are limited to around 100 kbps (kilobits per second).

So, many users will not be affected by this limitation. However, if you plan to backup huge quantities of data, you have to plan well ahead. First make a copy of your files on an external hard drive and then start your online backup with Carbonite.

If you have more than 200GB of data and want to get rid of the upspeed caps, you might want to consider their business plans.

Occasional skipping while watching movies

I love to watch IMDB trailers. And obviously I always watch those trailers in HD. I noticed some skipping in those videos while backing up my files with Carbonite. I first thought that it could be because I was working on a virtual machine. But after testing several configurations I found that when I paused Carbonite the video played without skipping. For me this is a minor flaw and no deal-breaker at all. It still could be a configuration issue with my computer. If you have a different experience, feel free to leave that in the comments.

• Fast backup

• Sometimes skipping while watching videos

Backup status

As I already mentioned earlier, I love the ability to monitor my backups exactly as they are performed. While Carbonite’s monitoring of backups is not as detailed as for example Idrive’s or SOS Online Backup’s, for example, the status overview it gives me has all the information I need: the number of files that are in the queue and the number of gigabytes that are left to be backed up.

Backup security

Online backup security is one of the major concerns of online backup providers. Imagine if anybody could have easily access to your files – I guess those providers would be out of business pretty soon. Therefore, Carbonite does put a lot of effort into security. However, I couldn’t find an option to connect via a proxy server to upload my data. While I have absolutely no problem putting my data in Carbonite’s hands, I think this would be a great addition to their service. But this again is a geeky gimmick that the average user will never need.

That aside, your files are encrypted twice. First, your files are encrypted by a 128-bit Blowfish encryption (which is also used by banks and other organizations), and then a second layer of encryption which is the Internet standard SSL technology. If those are just random numbers to you and you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry! The bottom line is, it is as secure as it can get. Some providers offer a higher personal encryption of even 448 bits (Mozy for example) but the security gain you get with a higher encryption is marginal.

Also, Carbonite deletes your files 30 days after you delete them. That differs from Facebook, for example, which keeps your data forever, even if you decide never to use it again.

Okay, the day has come and your computer just doesn’t start anymore. Now it’s time to restore your data – fast. Imagine you are working on an important project and the deadline is this afternoon. You need your files as fast as possible because otherwise you could lose your job. And we know how hard it is to get a new one in this economy.

With Carbonite you have 3 options to restore your files: you can restore all your files at once to do a full restore of everything. Depending on the files you have backed up this can take quite a while. However, if you need one file urgently, say the presentation you need this afternoon, you can browse your backup and select just that one file or a folder were your most important files are stored. This potentially will save you hours. When your project is finished you can always do a full restore of your files on the weekend.

If you have Carbonite HomePremier you can also do a full restore of your operation system and applications. This is not possible with the standard home plan. With Carbonite HomePremier you can also get a courier service that will overnight your files to you. While this may be a nice addition, you have to think about whether an additional $100 per year is worth it.

As I already pointed out in my Online Backup 101 Guide it is very important to occasionally do test restores of your files. This way you get a feel for how long it takes to restore all your files and whether everything works flawlessly. I have a calendar set up to remind me to do test restores once a month. I highly encourage you to do the same because otherwise you’re certainly going to forget it.

I already pointed out Carbonite’s ease of use, and in the restore process Carbonite doesn’t leave much room for error either.

Recently deleted files

Carbonite saves files in your backup for 30 days from when they were deleted from your computer just in case you need to get them back. So you have 30 days to restore an accidentally deleted file. Carbonite is even more generous with restoring previous versions of your files.

Carbonite saves up to 3 months of previous versions of your files in your backup in case you want to restore the previous version. I can’t stress enough how important this feature is. I am a Photoshop guy and it has happened more than 10 times that I have been working 4 hours on a project when I accidentally saved the wrong version of the file and thus deleted all my work. Ever since I’ve been using Carbonite I can finally work without worrying about accidentally overwriting important files. You are going to love this feature.

• Get files up to 30 days after deletion
• File versions of up to 3 month

Restore speed

Obviously, restore is a lot faster than backup, as it should be. Generally, download speed is a lot higher than upload speed. But it also depends on the algorithms the online backup service uses to send the data from their servers back to you. If the online backup service uses shady servers obviously files are going to take longer to get back to you.

Fortunately, Carbonite could convince me down the line. The restore process is very easy: just select all the files or individual files to restore and lean back. I was able to restore my 1 GB of files within 10 minutes.

Access your files remotely

I personally have my iPhone with me everywhere I go. Not only do I use it as a phone but also as a music player, reader, Internet navigator, and much more. I love the idea of having my backed up data always with me as well so I can access it as necessary. Actually, yesterday, Carbonite saved my butt. I had to give a presentation at Humboldt University here in Berlin. When I tried to open the presentation, it just wouldn’t work. Maybe there was an error while transferring the presentation to my laptop. I don’t know. But then I grabbed my cell phone and downloaded the Carbonite iPhone app. I just logged in with my user data and could access the presentation which I had made a backup of previously. And it worked!

Before writing this review I read many other reviews on the Internet that said you cannot access your files remotely when they have spaces or underscores in their file name. But apparently those reviews are outdated. In fact, the presentation I opened had 3 underscores in it. And it worked flawlessly. I tested it with several other files and I had no problem whatsoever. There was one issue, however: during my testing the iPhone app sometimes crashed. But after restart it worked fine. Just make sure you have enough time when you want to access your files via your mobile device.

Customer support

I can guarantee you the the time will come when you’ll need customer support. Therefore, I highly recommend testing customer support before signing up for an online backup service. This way you can see whether your problems are treated with enough care.

Some people have e-mailed me about bad experiences with Carbonite customer support. But I couldn’t verify that. I just wrote a test e-mail asking about a fake problem and got an answer within 24 hours. But in general customer support is something that all major online backup services could still improve a little.

The hard facts are that Carbonite offers phone support, e-mail and live chat while additionally giving you good tutorials in case you need help. I would be very interested in hearing your opinion about Carbonite customer support in the comments.

Carbonite backup summary

So, since you have made it this far, you probably know what the bottom line is here. Carbonite online backup is certainly not perfect but it is one of the best online backup providers out there. When you are willing to commit yourself for 3 years you’ll get the perfect insurance against all damage that could happen to your data. Imagine if you saved all your data on a hard drive at your home and suddenly there is a fire that destroys everything. One more reason not to rely on a single backup resource. One downside is the bandwidth cap that is issued after 200GB. That slows down your backup but shouldn’t stop you from considering online backup at all.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have multiple backups. I personally do have 3 backups. One backup is a full bare metal backup here at my house with Apple’s Time Capsule, and I have 2 additional backups with online backup providers one being Carbonite, and the other, Backblaze. Just do the math: for one cappuccino per month at Starbucks you can save your whole digital life.

Affiliate Disclosure: When you decide to sign up through one of my links I do get a small commission. This helps me to keep this site running as I put loads of effort into it trying to best serve my readers. The written reviews, as well as the detailed tutorial videos take up weeks of work. All the services I recommend here I use myself and I only share my experience with those products with you.

Great further reading:

1. Don’t Own Carbonite Stock? Probably Now It’s Time to Buy
2. Livedrive: Get your files into the cloud
3. Keepit keeps your files safe. Really?
4. Backing up and Sync your files with SugarSync
5. Why Backblaze Online Backup is Really Unlimited

Tagged as: carbonite, unlimted online backup