[Update] I received this post, supposedly from a Carbonite rep, but I contacted carbonite and the 2 e-mail addresses he gave me are not recognized as any of their employees, nor is his name:
Hello, I’m sorry to hear about the negative experience you had with your Carbonite account. I work with Carbonite and would like to talk with you when you have a second, so that we can try our best to correct this problem. You can reach me at XXXXX@gmail.com or xxxx@xxxx.com
Dave, if you are truly a Carbonite representative, please contact me again, but via a verifiable channel. I’m judging your contact as a scam otherwise.
I’ve been using carbonite.com for 2 or 3 years now. I’d been recommending them, strongly, during that time. I’ve even been saved, TWICE with their service. But, I’m reversing my recommendation today to “AVOID THEM AT ALL COSTS”. Here’s why:
My last hard drive failure happened sometime around October 2010. Instead of one of my extra drives, it was my boot drive that failed PLUS an extra drive. It had e-mail archives, all my music files, an encrypted volume using TrueCrypt, and I think some source code. It also had the documents for my son’s Cub Scout’s pack popcorn sale, for which I was the one responsible for managing the whole thing for the pack. I was able to log onto Carbonite’s web sit into my account and retrieve the popcorn files I needed to complete the season’s popcorn sales. I didn’t need the entire drives’ contents right away, so I set the bad drives aside, and felt comfortable with my data being held in a locked backup on Carbonite.com.
I bought a new hard drive, installed Windows, recovered what I could directly from the drive (which was very little) before the drive died completely. I couldn’t begin my carbonite restore process because of the way their restore process works. I had about 5 or so hard drives backed up to carbonite.com and to do a proper restore, I had to have the same physical drive letters available on my system as what carbonite.com was aware of, or else a 30 day timer would start and anything I didn’t get recovered would be deleted on their end. This takes time and effort, time which I didn’t really have.
Well, I had ANOTHER drive failure just recently (Late June 2011). I figured it was time to get my system back in shape and get it configured the way carbonite.com needed it so I could begin the restore process and also get back to being backed up again, since it hasen’t been backing me up since October 2010 because it was in a suspended state to not lose my already backed up data from the bad drives. (If you turn on normal backup operations, carbonite.com deletes files that you had backed up if they’re not on your local system for 30 days).
So, I logged into my carbonite.com account yesterday to pick a few files I desperately needed and low and behold, ALL OF MY DATA WAS DELETED! It turns out, my auto-renewing credit card was never renewed, NOR was I sent any e-mail notifications that they were having trouble renewing my account! In May, my account was ended, and 30 days later (14 days ago), they DELETED MY ENTIRE 110GB OF BACKED UP DATA!
Now it’s GONE FOREVER!
Here are other problems with the service:
- When you restore your data, you’re capped at 1mb/s. If you have a lot of data, it can take WEEKS to restore it!
- When restoring your data, if you’re not done in 30 days, anything not restored IS DELETED from their end!
- Browsing your backup with a web browser is broken! Not all of your files are accessible via the web browser. They know this is broken, but they don’t seem to have any intention of fixing it. This means, there are lots of files that can only be recovered via a FULL RESTORE!
- Apparently, their auto-renew service is broken.
- Apparently, their notification system to let you know your account is about to expire is broken.
- Apparently, their notification system to let you know your account is expired and your data will be deleted in 30 days is broken.
- Apparently, their notification system to let you know your data is about to be deleted is broken (or non-existent).
So, save yourself (and your data) by not trusting your important data to carbonite.com.
Other services to consider. Note that I’ve not tried any of these yet, so I have no opinion, but I thought I should at least offer some alternatives:
This site has a fairly comprehensive list of services: