Greg-Colo Loc: Fort Collins,Co

It's saved my bacon on my files

Mary Kate Loc: NYC

I have used Carbonite for a number of years. Last year for some reason my hard drive crashed. It was replaced and Carbonite did what it was supposed to do. I would recommend the product.

SqBear Loc: Kansas, (South Central)

Agree, use Carbonite, had a hard drive failure. Called Carbonite after the new HD installation and they walked me through the recovery. And I did not know what to expect. They were good, polite and very knowledgeable!

TheeGambler Loc: The green pastures of Northeast Texas

Lots of good response about Carbonite as a "backup." I should have used the words, "online storage." I need some place to put files, BUT I need to have easy access to them. Because of the response I got here at UHH, I did contact Carbonite. I was told by them, Carbonite, that they don't offer what I want.

Disappointed. I thought I had found my solution.
So, still looking for options. Maybe a second website with unlimited storage is the answer. So far, that is all I can come up with. I already have an external hard-drive.

bee7474 Loc: Selah, Wa

I have used carbonite for several years. Computer crashed three times and restored all my pictures. Sure glad I had carbonite. Great service.

Mick 53 Loc: Minneapolis

I have used Carbonite for a few years and very happy with their service. A few months ago my external hard drive crashed with about 1 TB of pictures. Carbonite restored everything to my new external hard drive. There customer service is awesome as the can remote in and help you restore or fix your issues with great ease. Drop box is another great way to store photos off site along with 2 external hard drives & etc. Back up, back up, back up.

jrushphoto Loc: Flint, MI

Check out some of the cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google drive. They sound like what you are looking for.

mainshipper Loc: Hernando, Florida

My personal experience with Carbonite was not as good as others and I recently dropped them and moved to iDrive. The issue that I had with Carbonite was that their claim of unlimited data was probably true but with a catch. It appears that after 200GB is uploaded the upload speed throttles back to the point that it is useless. This may have changed since I first encountered it as I never tested it beyond 200GB. The other issue I had was that they did not allow an external or NAS share as the source of the data so I had to create a clone of my data on a Windows Home Server so that the data would be local (as Carbonite saw it). I have a number of PCs that access my central storage pool and do not store my master files locally. That worked fine until this year when they informed me that because my Carbonite client was on a Windows Server I would have to move to a "professional" plan that cost more and had less capacity. At that point I started looking elsewhere and found iDrive. I was able to get a basic "personal" plan that gave me 1TB of storage and they don't care about where it comes from or what the client is running on. It was also less than Carbonite. My initial experience uploading around 300GB took about 10 days and was uneventful. I don't plan to upload my images as that is just too much data and will stick to saving my personal and data files (about 900GB). So far, iDrive is working for me.

As I said, I have all my data in a central storage pool on RAID 5 NAS box which is backed up on my network in several places for redundancy. When I travel I take a copy of all my data on a 4TB external drive with me as an additional level of backup. My PCs are backed up daily on the Windows Home Server and I have performed several bare metal restores using those backups.

sodapop Loc: Bel Air, MD

Carbonite does have a plan for external drives, at an additional cost. Nominal.
They tell me that transfer is slow so as not to interfere with other operation on the computer
Works for me and replaced my entire set of files one time when I obtained a new computer

kbarnes42 Loc: North Carolina

I have a friend that uses this service for their business. They lost their hard drive and had to recover their data. The good side was they were able to do this. The down side, with the amount of data to recover it took quite some time to recover.

chapjohn Loc: Tigard, Oregon

Amazon Cloud for photos might worth looking at. Each image has to be 2GB or smaller, but unlimited photo storage and retrieval for $12 a year.

thix2112

I use crashplan You can back up several computers and network drives/folders for an overall lower price. I like and prefer the crashplan interface. I use Dropbox for sharing files with my son and sister and for between computers and tablet.

DubyaVeeU Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

Had it several years ago, seemed okay. I decided to drop them after they stopped advertising on Rush Limbaugh . Glad I did - Backblaze and Crashplan are both better, faster, and cheaper. Crashplan is used by Fortune 500 companies for computer backup. I have several home computers on one plan, 3+ terabytes of data all for under $100/year.

These are backup solutions are designed for data recovery when hard drives fail, laptop stolen, etc. BUT I can access individual files quickly and easily with both Crashplan and Backblaze (I assume Carbonite has similar functionality). Takes seconds to download a file.

You may need more frequent or easier access to files. I also have a 3 terabyte external hard drive I use for this purpose. It acts like an extension of your existing computer plugged into a USB port. You can get one for $80 on sale at Costco. I also run a free downloadable program (FBackup) nightly to copy my computer drive contents to the external drive.

revhen Loc: By the beautiful Hudson

Carbonite saved my skin when my old computer hard drive crashed. Was able to restore a "lifetime" of work on my new computer via Carbonite. The hard drive on my laptop crashed. It's taken a couple of weeks to retrieve the information. Will cover that with Carbonite as soon as I get it back.

Another thing I just found out. Carbonite saves earlier uploads for 45 days. If one gets attacked by the evil hacker who encrypts one's data and demands money to enable access, one can go back to an un-encrypted set of files.

Get it without doubt!

Bloke Loc: Waynesboro, Pennsylvania

I have been using carbonite for almost a year now, and my system is fully backed up with them. I recently had to restore some stuff for the first time, and the experience was 'mixed' at best. The system is not very intuitive - I specified the name of the folder I needed, and it searched the backup and listed hundreds of files which were not even on the same hard drive!

I did eventually get my stuff back, after some help from their chat support. They push quite hard to sell the next level of service, where they will provide a hard drive for a full restore. She did tell me that the online restore is limited to a fairly-small number of GB per day, and that is not dependent on download speed.

The jump in price for this extra level is pretty steep for what it provides. I really just want to know that my files are all backed up safely in case I screw up, and what I have works for that. I am sure I saw on the website that the user has to provide the external disk for the panic restore, but the rep claimed that was not the case. This next level does allow backup of an external drive, and will automatically backup video files. I already back up my video files manually, and my only external drive is only plugged in once a month or so, to backup my stuff on there too. So, not much point in having its contents uploaded to Carbonite.

You might want to look at dropbox for your needs. I used them for quite a while before issues drove me away, but your mileage may vary. The concept of basically a cloud-based external drive would probably suit your purpose. My issue with them was that duplicate folders started to appear on my system with linked files in, and I could never be sure where to put something in order to be sure it would be backed up. When I contacted tech support, I got a message saying basically, "very interesting issue, but we don't have time to look into it right now, sorry".

Carbonite tech support is much better!