Carbonite 5.0

Carbonite has now backed up over 100 billion files, and that's growing at a clip of 200 million more per day. More importantly, the service has restored over 7 billion files for customers. So you don't have to worry about going with an untried player if you choose Carbonite. In its latest incarnation, the service has added a couple of premium levels that add the ability to back up to a local external disk and disk imaging. All of Carbonite's plans?the $59 per year Home, $99 per year HomePlus, and $149 per year HomePremier?cover just one PC, but offer unlimited online storage space. How does it compare with competitors like Mozy ($4.95 per month per PC, 3 stars) and SOS Online Backup ($9.95 per month for up to 5 PCs, 4 stars)? Read on to find out.

Setup
Getting started with Carbonite is a snap. The basic Home edition works with both Mac and Windows, while the two premium options only work on Windows. You can try out Carbonite using its free 15-day trial. Several competitors offer free service for smaller data limits?SOS and IDrive ($49.50 per year, 3.5 stars) give you 5GB free, while MiMedia ($9.99 per month, 3.5 stars) offers a whopping 7GB for free. No credit card is required for the Carbonite trial, but after the trial period the service will cost you $59 a year for unlimited back up storage of one PC.

The pricing is in line with the rest of the industry, but competitors like SOS Online Backup let you back up more than just one PC to your account, though they have data caps; for example SOS will back up 50GB from up to 5 PCs for $79.95 per year. Your subscription is auto-renewed unless you specify otherwise. To get started, you just need an e-mail address.

Next you choose a nickname for the computer you want to set up for online backup and whether it's a desktop, laptop, or server. Then you get a very clear, helpful dialog offering to set the service to automatically select files for backup?Documents, Picture, e-mail, settings, and so on?or Advanced, which lets you manually choose what to back up. The automatic option is helpful? for those who may not know what makes the most sense to back up (and similar to what Mozy offers), and even when I chose Advanced, the default option was to include Carbonite's recommended backup choices and add anything else I wanted. One problem: You can't run this wizard again after initial setup, as you can with SOS Online Backup.

Video files won't be selected for backup automatically unless you spring for the $149 per year HomePremier edition of the Carbonite service. That and the new $99 per year HomePlus option also will back up external hard drives and operating system software and applications. The last wizard page before you actually start backing up helpfully tells you what will not be backed up. In addition to the already mentioned types it also includes data on external drives and files over 4GB.

I first selected the automatic option, which I could later modify. I wish the setup stated ahead of time how large the set of backup files would be?for me the automatic selection netted over 11 thousand files weighing in at over 5GB?which I'd have preferred to trim down. After running the backup all night, 10 percent of this had been uploaded. And choosing the automatic option also meant I wasn't presented with the choice of keeping my encryption key local, for the ultimate in security, since then even Carbonite employees wouldn't be able to access the key.

Interface
Carbonite marks files and folders in Windows Explorer with dots?green for backed up, orange for awaiting backup, and green with a white center for folders with only some backed-up files. I like this clear marking system, as well as the program's right-click context menu option, which lets you add or remove any folder or file to the backup set at any time.

The Carbonite InfoCenter, accessible with a click on the program's tray icon in the form of a lock, is where you can see everything the software's up to?backup set status and schedule. It's also one place from which you can start a file restore procedure. From the tray icon, you can also pause the backup upload, freeze the backup, or set it to low priority to give other apps first dibs on Internet access bandwidth. This is just a "reduce Carbonite's Internet usage" option, rather than a slider that lets you control it relative usage by percent, as some others offer.

Carbonite creates a shadow drive on your PC, called Carbonite Backup Drive. You can see this in Windows Explorer, or by clicking on InfoCenter's View files link. The InfoCenter has an uncomplicated design, which I like. It doesn't offer a tree-view of folders and files with checkboxes for backup selection as Mozy does. Instead, you do all this in Windows Explorer?why reinvent the wheel, after all?

Selecting and Scheduling Backups
When it comes to the question of when will files be uploaded, the Set Options tab's Backup Schedule sub-tab has the answers. The first, and recommended, option is Automatic, which works in the background and uploads new and changed files in the folders specified. Oddly, though I set up with default automatic settings, the recommended automatic option wasn't selected for me.

Carbonite doesn't let you specify a file type you want backed up, wherever it is on the PC?say you happened to save a .doc file quickly to an new folder that Carbonite didn't know about yet?or even the wrong folder. Competitors like IDrive ($49.50 per year, 3.5 stars) do allow this by-file-type backup, and they also let you make your own rules about file types, sizes, and dates to include in the backup set. When I changed an image file and chose "Back this up as soon as possible" I expected Carbonite to make this its next order of business, but many other files were backed up while I waited. After a Pause and resuming, my test file was backed up.

Another thing Carbonite's doesn't support is backing up external hard drives, USB drives or network drives?unless you spring for the premium editions, and in that case, you still don't get network drives, just one external drive. SOS Online Backup does. Carbonite does let you back up open files, such as your Outlook .PST file. I tested this with an open Excel file which I changed and then requested ASAP backup from the right-click menu. With the file still open, I saw both versions in Carbonite's virtual drive.

Since Carbonite by default uploads whenever you add or change files, there's no need to set a schedule for backup and upload, but you can from Settings if you prefer.

Using a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo laptop with 3GB RAM, a mixed bag of 100 files equalling 100MB took Carbonite 4 minutes 36 seconds, while needed SOS just 4 minutes to process, upload, and verify. The same batch on the same PC and connection tool took MozyHome 2.0 ($4.95 per month, 3 stars) 6 minutes 46 seconds. Of course, the differences will be multiplied over much larger backups. Still, your upload speed is likely to be the main factor. Carbonite's InfoCenter offered progress bars showing the current file and total job percent complete, but it wasn't as detailed as SOS's backup progress dialog, accessible from the program's tray icon.

One important point about speed is that, though you have no maximum data cap for files stored on Carbonite's servers, once you pass the 35GB mark, your upload speeds are throttled down considerably, from 2MB/sec to 512Kbps, and once you pass 200GB, it's reduced further, to 100Kbps/sec?that's nearly dial-up modem speed. The premium account levels keep the speed up a 2MB/sec all the way up to 200GB uploaded. This throttling takes away some of the appeal of "unlimited"?some users who want a large amount of data stored quickly would do better to choose a "limited" 250GB account from another vender like SOS or IDrive.

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