Carbonite Adds Remote Access to Online Backup Comments

Online backup isn't taking off is because it's not practical yet. If you want to backup your photos and music, Carbonite will take forever to upload your files to their server (last time I tried to backup a fraction of my stuff with Carbonite it was going to take over 12 months to complete on an 8MB ADSL line). The BT backup service suffered similar issues. Presumably, if my disk died, it would also take months to get everything back, which isn't much use to me. Online backup might be an option if you only have a few GB of files, but if so there are cheaper and easier ways to backup your stuff...

@RJ - Have to disagree with you. I'm a Mozy user and have over 200GB backed up. Yes, that was over a period of time but once started you just leave it working (I use in addition to a local backup)
Oh and Mozy has offered remote access for a while but the Carbonite search function is definitely an advantage.

The problem I found with carbonite was if you rebuilt your PC, i.e. it didn't just die, and you managed to save all your data first you couldn't just resync, you had to upload all the content again. My advice would to be get a NAS with FTP.

I use SpiderOak's free 2GB - has a Linux client and you can have it on multiple devices for the one cost.

However, if you;re basically only backing up one machine it's got a serious negative - $120 a year for 100GB as opposed to $55 a year for unlimited. Frankly I can't see myself uploading more than 100GB, but the difference in cost per year is huge. Best of both worlds would be nice!

Gordon: Thanks very much for the write-up on Carbonite. One minor point -- we save versions for 90 days, not 30. Both the Remote Access and searchable restore features have been very well received by our customers.

Regarding some of the comments above, RJ says remote backup isn't practical yet. Obviously it depends how much data you have. I'd say anyone with more than 100GB might find the intial back to be too slow, but our average customer is backing up 20-30GB, and even the slowest DSL works fine with that amount of data. There are millions of people already using Carbonite and similar services, so it works for most people.

Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.