If it's that slow, I would go to www.speakeasy.net and do a test on your upload and download speeds. There are also settings in Carbonite to give it permission to use more of your upload bandwidth to hasten things. In my experience with over 4,000 clients, there is not much difference between any of the cloud services in doing your first, full blast backup and the big differences that do appear are usually the result of a poor Internet connection. Also, I believe they have the ability to accept an external drive from you to perform an immediate initial backup from, eliminating the lengthy upload process common with large data sets these days. I guess I'm just saying it's inherent in the technology.

I use Carbonite and have about 700GB out there, much of which is RAW files. And yes, it took nearly a month to get my stuff all into the cloud. I'm a computer consultant and use external hard drives as well. The cloud backup is a belt and suspenders extra level of security for my stuff in case a fire, tornado or other natural disaster wipes out my whole location. Most folks don't realize their upload speeds are much slower than their download speeds. All services take quite a while to do your initial backup, since they don't want to use 100% of your outbound bandwidth. I just let my main computer run around the clock as much as possible until the initial backup completed. Once your backup is complete, Carbonite only has to keep up with new items, modified items or deleted items. One other benefit of Carbonite is it has a rolling 30-day version of all your files, so you can go back in time up to 30-days on any or all of your files, helpful if one of the newer viruses encrypts your entire hard drive as has happened to some of my clients. With major amounts of data, you can pay Carbonite to ship you an external hard drive with your backup on it in an emergency, in case downloading is not fast enough for you. Or, you can prioritize what you want restored first and wait for the rest to dribble in. Hope this sheds some light.

I use Carbonite and have about 700GB out there, much of which is RAW files. And yes, it took nearly a month to get my stuff all into the cloud. I'm a computer consultant and use external hard drives as well. The cloud backup is a belt and suspenders extra level of security for my stuff in case a fire, tornado or other natural disaster wipes out my whole location. Most folks don't realize their upload speeds are much slower than their download speeds. All services take quite a while to do your initial backup, since they don't want to use 100% of your outbound bandwidth. I just let my main computer run around the clock as much as possible until the initial backup completed. Once your backup is complete, Carbonite only has to keep up with new items, modified items or deleted items. One other benefit of Carbonite is it has a rolling 30-day version of all your files, so you can go back in time up to 30-days on any or all of your files, helpful if one of the newer viruses encrypts your entire hard drive as has happened to some of my clients. With major amounts of data, you can pay Carbonite to ship you an external hard drive with your backup on it in an emergency, in case downloading is not fast enough for you. Or, you can prioritize what you want restored first and wait for the rest to dribble in. Hope this sheds some light.