[Rant] Gave up Carbonite because it is too slow

Like I mentioned a while ago, I’m not going to renew my subscription to Carbonite. Why? Because it is too slow to backup data once you pass that 200GB mark. I have another 1.4TB left and that’s going to grow bigger with time.

It would be cheaper to buy a new hard drive and ship it to Sri Lanka with someone.

Thus, this is not the off-sight backup service for me.

But I don’t know if there is a service that would work for me. I don’t feel like spending any more money one backup. Heck, I haven’t had any hard drive fail on me. And I do have a local 1-to-1 backup. Maybe I should take that drive out of the PC and make it an external drive. That would protect the data from an accidental hardware failure or security issue such as viruses.

[Rant] Status of Carbonite backup after 10 months

In last December, I paid for a 1 year subscription of Carbonite. If you guys don't know, Carbonite is a cloud backup service that gives you "unlimited" cloud backup storage for a monthly price of about $5. There are two conditions though. First one is that you can only backup the data on your internal hard drives. The second is more restrictive. Once your backed up amount of data exceeds 200GB, your upload speed drops from 2Mbps to like 100kbps. Basically it is not unlimited backup. You are limited by time.

There are few other issues as well. You have to get a subscription for a whole year at once. There is no way you can pay monthly. So even if you feel that it is not going to work well for you, you cannot cancel it at halfway mark and get the remainder of your money back.

 

Then, even if you have super fast internet at home, the restore speeds are going to be very slow. What good is a backup if you cannot restore it? I saw somewhere that the restore speeds are like 14GB per day. That's quite low. What if you somehow managed to upload like half a terabyte of data? It'll take more than a month to get the whole thing back.

 

There is one thing that's not clear though. Carbonite only keeps a file backed up for 30 days. That means, if you have deleted the file from your hard drives, Carbonite will do the same but after a month. It is to stop people from abusing the system. Carbonite is a backup solution, not a storage solution. What I mean by that is you should have pair of files: the original and the backup. If there is no original (say you deleted it), the backup become the original. Say you have a 100GB hard disk. This will stop you from using Carbonite to expand it to 200GB by deleting files that are on the drive and adding new files. We all have files on the hard drive that probably might never be needed again. You could simply store them in Carbonite and not locally. No, you cannot do that. But of course they have to give us time to restore the file in the case of a crash. That time is one month. But say that you lose everything. Now you have to get everything from the backup. Once you've started the restore process, even if the 30 day period is exceeded (which is very likely to happen) the files should not be deleted. Does that happen in that fashion? If it does not, Carbonite is useless.

 

But if restore time is the issue, there is a way to get your backup quickly. You can tell them to courier a hard drive with the backup on it to you. But for that service, you have to pay extra. You have to get the Home Premier subscription which costs $149 per year. That's pretty steep but they have to bear the cost of the hard drives as well. So it is not unfair. I don't know how often you can ask them to send you back a copy though. Can you keep the hard drives as well?

 

After 10 months of backing up (not 24/7 of course) my backup status is like this. The backup is growing very slowly. But the amount of data that needs to be backed up has grown a lot in the last couple of months. Most of them are photos from trips. (But I’d rather keep what I am uploading “just to myself”, hence I’m “censoring the filename”.)

 

 

To be honest, I'm not so happy about the limitations of Carbonite. With hard drive sizes growing, if you are limited to just 200GB or so data, that doesn't make sense. I think I am not going to continue the subscription next year. I'm definitely not going to upgrade to the Home Premier tier so that I can get the backup couriered. Besides, even right now I have a local backup. Once my first year runs out, I'm going to think of another plan. Maybe a NAS. Who knows? But I don't want to get something bulky.

Carbonite backup status as at 2013-03-26

I am using Carbonite as my off-site backup solution. I subscribed to Carbonite Home Backup in December last year and now I’ve backed up my data for almost 3 months. (I was in Sri Lanka for 3 weeks, so the PC wasn’t backing up during that period.)

I updated where I stood a month ago. The amount of data uploaded by 26th of February 2013 was 113GB. After a whole month, Carbonite has managed to increase the size of my backup to 206GB. That’s a 93GB increase in a month. 3GB/day on average. Not bad right?

But now I have gone beyond 200GB, I think the speed will throttle back significantly. Let’s hope it doesn’t penalize too much. I will update in a month.

BTW, Carbonite recommended me to upgrade to Home Premium because my backup size was large. Downloading everything in case something happens is not feasible. Home Premium supports Courier Recovery, which means that they will send me a hard drive with the data for faster recovery. But I have to pay an extra $90 annually. Well, that’s not a LOT, considering how valuable your data is. But I already have a local backup, so I would stick to Home for the time being.

An update on Carbonite Backup status

About 2 months ago, I signed up for Carbonite. I got an extra 2 months of free subscription thanks to the offer code from Leo’s TWIT network. So, 14 months, plus the 14 days trial period. Unfortunately, I had to break the backing up spree after about 10 days into the trial period because I visited Sri Lanka. Even though it was originally supposed to be a 2 week break, it ended up being 3 weeks.

The price being reasonably cheap for unlimited size of storage, the only problem that remained was how long it would take to backup all of my data to the Carbonite servers. The speeds seemed to be good for the initial few gigabytes of data but it would slowly crawl down to 2Mbps. (With a capacity of 200Mbps in my internet connection, that’s so much wastage.) Given that I have over 1TB of data to be backed up, it would take a couple of years until all of that data was safely stored in the cloud. I won’t be running my PC 24/7 just for Carbonite.

Accurately speaking, I first subscribed to Carbonite on 2012/12/11. We left for Sri Lanka on 2012/12/23. So I ran Carbonite till 2012/12/22 evening. That’s 12 days. Then we arrived back in Japan on 2012/01/13 and I actually forgot to install Carbonite straight away. So the backup resumed from 2012/01/15. That’s another 18 days. So, in total, it’s been only 30 days - a full month – of backing up time.

So after 30 full days of uploading, this is the state of my Carbonite backup.

Note: I have no idea what that file it is uploading in the above screenshot.

113GB of my data has been uploaded. That’s actually better that I imagined. That means, after full 10 months of use, I might be able to upload all of my data to the Carbonite servers. It states that I only have 616GB remaining – I probably have to add more files to the backup queue manually. It doesn’t add those clunky files such as huge video files and ISO files to the backup by default. I just have to force it.

The revamped data backup plan – with Carbonite

With the recent upgrades to the storage setup (here and here), I have started considering backing up my important data (heck, they are all “important”) very seriously. I cannot afford to lose my photos and documents. I even am paranoid about the photos that I made several SkyDrive accounts to upload the photos takes on trips in Japan. Besides, the doom’s day is just around the corner. LOL

 

Anyways…

 

There is a commonly accepted rule when it comes to backing up your important files. It’s called the 3-2-1 rule.

 

The 3-2-1 rule

This is what the rule suggests.

• You should keep 3 copies of any important file (a primary and two backups)
• You should have the files on 2 different media types (such as hard drive and optical media), to protect against different types of hazards.
• 1 copy should be stored offsite (or at least offline.)

 

Is it feasible?

Currently, my backup plan is not ideal. It’s just built on convenience, rather than the safety of the data.

I don’t like optical media. It would need more than 250 DVDs to backup my entire hard drive (just the data that’s available now). It’s just not practical – not even close. Only solution is to use hard drives. So, I have a 2nd hard drive just for backing up the data on the main data drive, which is pretty much in sleep to reduce wear and tear (and power consumption, but that talk is for this topic).