I finally decided to systematically back up my home computer – the one I have for family/personal use. I’ve been using one sort of PC or another since the Compaq Portable in the mid-1980s. In all that time, I’ve only done sporadic backups of various directories when paranoia kicked in. Despite this utter lack of care, I’ve pretty much never lost an important file due to a failure or accident. I have had two hard drives fail on me, but in both cases a data recovery service was able to recover all the files.
But I figure that after 20 years, I may be pushing my luck a wee bit too far. So I decided to check out Carbonite, based on David Pogue’s review of the leading web (oops, now cloud) based backup services: Carbonite and Mozy.
I’m currently in the middle of a 15-day free trial of Carbonite and I’m loving it: simple to install, completely unobtrusive, continuously operating. There’s only one problem, but it’s a show-stopper for me: Carbonite will not backup external drives! In my case that means it won’t back up the USB drive that I use to store all my photographs and videos and music.
I was (and I still am) incredulous. I didn’t recall a single review mentioning this crippling feature. I was so incredulous that I searched the web to confirm it. My first confirmation was from this 2007 blog post comment (Carbonite: FAIL, Mozy: ON NOTICE) by the (then?) CEO of Carbonite:
David Friend wrote:
James: Hi, I’m the CEO of Carbonite and I noticed your comments about Carbonite on your blog. Backing up external hard drives is a feature that is available in our PLUS product which will be available shortly. Carbonite didn’t fail to back up your hard drive – we state clearly on the web site that the BASIC version does not back up external hard drives. Doing so would alter the economics of our business model and would require that we charge everyone a much higher price, or abandon our UNLIMITED backup policy which most of our customers really like.
Regards,
Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com Carbonite Online BackupPosted on 23-Oct-07 at 9:03 am | Permalink
When I read this I thought to myself, “Great! Let’s check out Carbonite Plus to see how much it costs. It’s been almost two years since this post, so I’m sure it’s available now.” So I go to the Carbonite site and search for “carbonite plus”. Unfortunately, this is what I found:
1074 : [General] External, Network, and USB Drives
Article Viewed 3Reviewed 6/11/2009
The current version of Carbonite backs up only the files that reside on permanent hard drives on your PC.
Check back soon for a Carbonite service plan that will allow you to back up your external drives.
So I guess I’ll check back around mid-2011. In the meantime, I’m off to check out Mozy…
4 responses so far ↓
1 Robert Ellison // Jun 19, 2009 at 10:53 pm
There’s another huge problem with online backup – the amount of time it takes to upload a significant amount of data. An alternative is social or p2p backup – you store your files with a friend or family member instead of a datacenter. I work for Cucku and our product lets you backup from/to external drives among many other capabilities you don’t get with online backup.
2 Online Backups Review // Jun 22, 2009 at 11:13 am
Sorry you had to find out the hard way that USB drives are not supported. Mozy supports them, but only in their Pro version. If you’re looking to backup network drives, IDrive may be the best way to go.
You can compare online backup services at our website.
3 Floridawebdesign // Jul 27, 2009 at 4:49 pm
I tried carbonite and had the absolute worst experience. yes, they say initial upload takes a long time, however they could not provide any answers as to why their server disconnected my during backups that ran overnight. I finally ended up giving up and backing up to external.
If you check their reviews, there are far too many people claiming their backups were corrupted or non existent when they tried to retrieve them from carbonite. The other problem is that carbonite doesnt keep your directory structure and renames all your files so if you have hundreds or thousands of files good luck sorting through them all when and if you ever need them!
4 J. Bales // Oct 14, 2009 at 11:24 pm
I tried a trial of Carbonite only to find out they don’t do externals. I’m a photographer, and HAVE to use an external drive for my photographs.
I just learned Carbonite doesn’t do external drives, so Carbonite is useless.
I have used Mozy in the past, and they were great until it came time to restore.
The restore process is a joke! The \virtual hard drive\ did not work. Their techs couldn’t tell me why and had me use their online backup (that was their \solution\….just make it inconvenient for me instead of solving the problem). UGH! It d/l stuff into chunks of unorganized chaos.
Half of the stuff that I’d told it to back up NEVER backed up, even though it said it did.
So now I’m looking for another option besides Mozy and Carbonite.
You wouldn’t think this would be a difficult thing for someone in the business of providing remote backups to people with a lot of data.
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