Things I have encountered on clients using Carbonite.

Can get pricey. You won't know the real price until you see their quote. Have one client who pays a couple of hundred a month to have his medium sized company on Carbonite.

Takes Veeeery long to get your files restored.. sometimes days. Not good in a situation where you need to get back up and running fast, such as in business recovery.

Always do a test restore, no matter how good the reviews, to see if the backups are valid. I can certainly tell you stories about backup systems that were never "test restored" and did not function properly when a real disaster occurred. In other words, when you need it, will it work as promised and bail you out of a jam.

"Passing the Buck" on responsibility. If you read the contracts very carefully on all these "cloud" systems, I think you will find that they say, contractually, that they are not "liable" for the value of lost data they cannot provide.

The "Passing the Buck" comment comes in when you actually think you can pass ultimate responsibility to a third party. The phrase "don't quit your day job" comes to mind.

In a few words, continue to do your own, redundant, data backups. Cloud backups should only be considered another level of redundancy in backing up date. They ONLY qualify as an off-site redundant method, and still subject to the vagaries of the stability of the internet.

If they shut down one weekend and don't come up on Monday, have you ever tried to find the principals who own or control an internet site????

I have, and I have seen clients who lost their backups because web sites go down permanently more than one might imagine.

I had one client who set up a "professional" web site backup, and quit backing up locally. Turned it all over to the web site sytem. They failed in the biz, and he never saw his stuff again. Foolishly, he had a portion of his work "ONLY" on that web site.

No recourse, no recovery....

Ever asked to see the P&L and financial sheets of a Web Site before doing business with them, as well as a CEO name and a list of the Board of Directors.

Would you run "YOUR" business that way?

As far as the time Carbonite has been in business, they started from Staples in 2006, as one of the early "Online backup Systems". OK, so I guess 6 years is a long time in internet stability.

I'm 70 years old, and I still do business with companies I started with when I was twenty years old. Now that is history. Six years in business is not necessarily the sign of a long standing, and traditional company.

Wow thanks for all this info. I was using Amazon's cloud drive, but there is no sync. You have to upload all pictures individually. Each photo takes about 2 minutes. I have over 40,000 pics and was about to lose my mind d! Stayed up til 2am last nite doing research on alternate storages. Liked Carbonite the best. It's been uploading my files since 2 this morning (it's almost 11am now)and it still has over 36,000 pics . But it is doing it itself! And it says once this initial upload is done, it will sync any new or changed data. It sounds too good to be true, but from the replies here, I think I may just have picked a winner! I have a 5tb external hard drive too. I think I'm on my way to being SAFE!

I'd be a little careful with places like Jimmy Drive. He has not been around very long. I have no idea if he is storing files in a data center or in his garage, are they striped on an array or on a single drive. Are they on Storage devices such as centera and replicated for safety. Are they kept in redundant data centers?

There are others besides Carbonite but can't remember them all now. I would just use a company that has been around for a while and are storing files in a secure data center. I use Carbonite myself.