I wrote to them a while ago about joining and pointed out that my data set is abnormally large, 30 years of saving bits adds up, and likely to get a lot larger. I asked about what they technically offer and options to get a bigger slice. They only said, the have only one plan.

Given the cost of storage and hosting, $50/yr should get maybe upwards of 10 GByte of storage hosted for a year. That should be plenty for the data on a laptop (like what a college student, his intended customers, would have).

It would be nice to have an outline of what they consider reasonable. I get that they don’t want to limit, but need to be open about the realities.

A complete restore through a tiny straw 200Kb/s is unreasonable for a large data set. To have an option to pay for DVDs overnighted in the mail would probably be a big win for everyone. Heck, getting the DVDs as archival backups might be promoted as the norm and not the exception.

- Rick “Food for thought” ;^)

http://www.justinball.com/2008/02/22/mozycom-and-their-backup-software-is-shit/

Just went through and completed (incomplete) a restore. While comparing some restored folders I discovered BIG GAPS in file listings.

I knew one has to right click and select “back this up” to enable exe, dll and others to be backed up. What I didn’t know is how many file types are excluded. I list them all here but they have been listed on this post:
http://www.tomkirkham.com/node/109

You will learn that Carbonite’s exclusions will make it impractical for any user doing serious work who has multi gigabytes of data.

I learned it is impossible to inventory/compare thousands of files to insure one is not missing something important.

I discovered how SLOW explorer runs when accessing the Carbonite Backup Drive. Mine crashed three out of five attempts. I NEVER was able to view the recovery log. My system would not display it. 2.4GHZ w/2GB RAM.

It is my opinion that the online backup industry is in its infancy with lots of business models testing the waters.

I have compared several online backup solutions. incl. DriveHQ, FilesAnywhere, DataDepositbox, Box.net XDrive and Carbonite. Box.net doesn’t offer any kind of real backup service, but somehow they claim they have. XDrive service is terrible now being part of much hated AOL company. DriveHQ and FilesAnywhere probably have the best software. But FilesAnywhere is much harder to use and more expensive. From that point of view, DriveHQ has the best value in price, features and usability. I am not sure why DataDepositBox even exists? they don’t have a decent product, not competitive at all. But I guess they must be in this business long enough to have some business users continue paying to them or they are just keep bleeding?

Start with a free trial of the application to get a hang of its features. IBackup has easy-to-use features to do quick and safe backups of your important files and folders. All file backups you do are secure with the highest level of 128-bit SSL encryption on transmission.

For a user looking to safely and securely backup data, what ultimately matter are the ease and the speed by which he can manage all the tasks. IBackup for Windows does exactly this for the user. A good thing about IBackup is that your online IBackup account will be mapped as a local drive onto your computer with IDrive (www.ibackup.com/IBDrive_new.htm). Then the user can just sit in front of your machine, edit and save files and folders. You can also drag and drop files to the IBackup account from the Windows explorer. IBackup does incremental and compressed backups, which greatly reduce your network bandwidth by transferring only portions of modified files.

With IDrive Multimedia you can stream multimedia files using a media player. The music files can also be managed with a browser application called Web-Manager (www.ibackup.com/webmanager.htm). All media files backed up in your account will be displayed in a Media Gallery and you can share these files with others by creating sharable links. You can also ‘Privately Share’ data instantly with another IBackup user using Web-Manager. Using Web-Manager you can also create new folders, upload files, move, rename, delete and search files in your online account.

With externals running at about $.60/gig I see no reason to depent on these off site schemes.

mud

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