"I had been happy with Carbonite for 4 years and used it for office and home computer. Even used it successfully to get back some photo files that disappeared, and had good experience with phone support when they offered to check the set up. However i wanted a change this year to local company, and did not renew. My credit card had been cgd by the bank in Nov, yet Carbonite was able to renew (I had thought had more time to act since they did not ever get the current update card info on that cancelled card). Quite an arduous process involving multiple emails each with 48hr turn around. Finally got one with apology saying I had provided the needed info in second email, and that my money would be returned. This left me with negative feeling about their slooow process to resolve my problem."

"Offsite backups are a viable service but only if the company and related programs are reliable. Carbonite simply is not.

My first system took forever to backup and after my system died the restoration was useless. My local backup was what I had to use to restore my files to my new system.

If your main folder name or any folder names are different but all the files and content are the same, Carbonite sees it as a totally different backup.

What was worse was what happened after I purged my old backup and spend a week uploading my new backup. The backup did complete after a time, but for reasons unknown, the majority of my supposedly completed backup simply disappeared shortly after I was informed that the backup was complete. Approximately 80% of the backup was simply gone.

Their canned answer is to uninstall and reinstall the client program. After several cycles of doing so, it became painfully obvious that Carbonite could not only not solve my problem but was simply SNL software; not yet ready for primetime. Their software never would update the backup after that point.

What are worse are the other problems with their software. You can select or deselect what folders and files you want backed up. Their client seems to think it knows what needs to be backed up rather than follow your selection.

Not only were folders that I had selected for backup unselected randomly but folder I had selected no to backup were constantly tagged for backup.

I work in the IT industry and off-site backups are standard operating procedure. If you want the same thing for your home, either look into another service other than Carbonite or buy an external drive and fireproof safe and backup weekly or monthly.

That would be more reliable than Carbonite any day and much cheaper in the long run.
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