Carbonite is an offsite backup product with a general philosophy of install it and forget it. The short form review is that it probably works well enough for general consumer use. It seems well written, it’s extremely simple to use, and the customer support crew is very reactive and keyed into the difficulties that joe-average user might have.
On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be engineered for large file systems. The first sign of this was when Carbonite announced it was “done, you’re all backed up!” after only a few hours and a few gigabytes of data. It turned out to have only backed up the “documents and settings” folder. I pointed it at my real data (images, mp3s, cvs repository, source code) and it seemed to be chugging along, so far so good.
After a while I noticed Carbonite doing complete file system scans, which severely degraded my system’s performance, and due to its “no options” philosophy there is no way to slow down or schedule them. Also viewing the backed-up file database (presented as a pseudo disk drive) is extremely slow. I think the algorithms being employed just didn’t envision file systems with 200,000 files in the backup area. This is probably fixable, but until It’s fixed I can’t have Carbonite around.
Note the date of this review and your current calendar. Carbonite is a promising product, just not ready for my kind of user yet.
