Carbonite Safe cloud backup review
Our Verdict
Carbonite Rubber provides the nuts and does them well, but you'll pay a lot for the features you lot really desire.
For
- Unlimited storage
- Clever and intuitive backup flagging system
- Courier service is great for emergencies
Confronting
- Base plan is fairly expensive
- Odd and frustrating restrictions
- Weak upload operation
- No mobile apps at present
Tom'south Guide Verdict
Carbonite Prophylactic provides the nuts and does them well, but you'll pay a lot for the features you really want.
Pros
- +
Unlimited storage
- +
Clever and intuitive backup flagging system
- +
Courier service is great for emergencies
Cons
- -
Base plan is fairly expensive
- -
Odd and frustrating restrictions
- -
Weak upload functioning
- -
No mobile apps at nowadays
Carbonite Safe: Specs
Number of devices backed up per subscription: Upward to 5 computers
Storage limit: Unlimited
Backups of tethered external drives: One drive, with Plus or Prime plans
Backups of network storage drives: No
Backups of mobile devices: No
Operating organisation/awarding backups: No
Backups to local drives: No
Two-factor authentication: Aye
Drive shipping: Restore only
I wouldn't count unlimited storage infinite as a must-have characteristic for a cloud-backup service, but it is nice to have. Carbonite Condom starts with a point in its favor at that place, withal while all services with unlimited storage accept some limitations, Carbonite's are the about restrictive.
This detriment, coupled with Carbonite's loftier prices, particularly for those who need to regularly back up video files, makes Carbonite Safe a tough recommendation among the best cloud backup solutions, despite a number of excellent UI elements that I would love to see others adopt.
(Carbonite has temporarily slashed prices on its Safe plans past thirty%, merely they're even so a bit more than than comparable offerings from rival services.)
Consumers craving a simple online backup solution for a single motorcar should consider Backblaze, while anyone with more than one machine to dorsum up volition want to look at IDrive.
Let'southward take a closer await at what Carbonite Safe has to offer and encounter whether this still might exist the right solution for you.
Read on for the rest of our Carbonite Safe review.
Carbonite Safety: Cloud backup services defined
Online-backup services, or cloud fill-in services, make online copies of all the personal files on your estimator. Some of these services tin can also support system files, applications, smartphones, tablets and external hard drives. About offering unlimited (or lots of) storage for a apartment subscription fee, and some (simply non Carbonite Safe) can also make local backups to an external hard bulldoze.
These aren't the same every bit online-syncing services like Dropbox or OneDrive, which create copies of specific files and button them out to all your devices. It would price too much and accept also long to use a syncing service to support all your files.
If y'all have thousands of photos, videos, or music files you want backed up to a condom location, a cloud-backup service is what you lot need.
Carbonite Rubber: Costs and what'due south covered
Carbonite has a slightly disruptive price construction, depending on your needs, and the company has drastically reduced the incentives for multi-twelvemonth subscriptions.
The everyman tier, Carbonite Safe Bones, comes with unlimited storage space for $vi a month, only you lot accept to pay that annually ($71.99 per year, temporarily discounted to $58.99 for the beginning yr).
You lot can likewise get a slight discount from the full cost by paying for 2 years ($136.78, v% off) or three years ($194.37, 10% off) at a time.
These are prices for a single computer, and yous'll pay the total price for each additional motorcar. (Carbonite does offer a 15-twenty-four hours free trial.)
Carbonite Safe Plus brings you up to $111.99 per year, currently discounted to $83.99 for the first year. (It'due south $212.78 for two years and $302.37 for three.) This plan adds both the ability to include one USB-tethered external hard drive in the backup and automatic fill-in of video files. (Bankroll upwards networked drives is not available with any Carbonite consumer programme.) It besides includes Webroot antivirus software.
Safe Bones users have to individually select videos to back them upward, and beyond all three Carbonite subscription levels, y'all will need to individually select files over 4GB for fill-in.
The virtually expensive plan is called Carbonite Condom Prime and it reduces the cost of Carbonite'due south Courier Recovery service from $99.99 per example to just $9.99. This service copies your files over to a physical drive and ships it to your home accost in the event that yous need to recover a big number of your files. The cost for Safe Prime is $149.99 for one yr (discounted to $104.99 for the first year), $284.98 for ii years or $404.97 for iii years.
The best direct comparison to Carbonite Safe Prime number is Backblaze's bones plan, which for $lxx per twelvemonth backs up a single PC, including video files and attached hard drives, and includes a similar drive-shipping recovery service that you can use for gratis upwards to v times per year.
That'south an $80 savings each year versus the comparable Carbonite programme, plenty to become yourself a dainty external hard drive if you don't already take one.
Let's say you, instead, accept three machines to back up. Carbonite Safe Basic would cost upwards to $216 per twelvemonth, but you still won't go automatic video backups or the free courier service.
IDrive could cover all three computers (nether a unmarried account) and give you both of those missing features (includes one free yearly use of the courier service) for $79.50 per year for 5TB of backup infinite, or $99.50 per year for 10TB.
Carbonite Safe and its Plus and Prime versions run on Windows 7, Mac OS Ten 10.10 Yosemite and later versions of both operating systems. At the time of this review, Carbonite did non offering mobile apps.
Carbonite Condom: Performance
We tested each cloud-fill-in service using a Lenovo Yoga C940 14-inch laptop with a 10th- Gen Intel Core i7 running Windows ten Habitation 64. Mobile apps were tested on a Google Pixel 3 with Android x. Each service's software was uninstalled from both devices before another service's software was installed.
Our exam ready of files to back up consisted of xv.6GB of documents, photos, videos and music. Nosotros uploaded this information to each cloud-backup service and then restored a 1.4GB subset of these files to the Lenovo Yoga C940.
We used the GlassWire application to monitor upload and download speeds and the congenital-in Windows Resource Monitor to track CPU usage.
Nosotros conducted our tests in Middleton, Wisconsin, using TDS Telecom Extreme300 Cobweb habitation internet service, which theoretically provided up to 300 megabits per 2nd (Mbps) down and 300 Mbps upward. Real-globe speeds were typically closer to 50 Mbps down and 60 Mbps up, co-ordinate to Speedtest.net.
| Acronis True Paradigm | Backblaze | Carbonite Prophylactic | CrashPlan for Small Business organisation | IDrive Personal | |
| Initial upload speed | 26.4 Mbps | 36.four Mbps | 17 Mbps | 27 Mbps | 25.1 Mbps |
| File-restore speed | 13.1 Mbps | 27.five Mbps | 21.1 Mbps | 34.4 Mbps | 12.4 Mbps |
| CPU usage during fill-in | >1% | 2.five% | 3.3% | seven.3% | 1.two% |
| CPU usage otherwise | >1% | >1% | >1% | >1% | >i% |
Our initial upload of the 15.6GB of files to Carbonite'due south servers took approximately ii hours and 21 minutes, with an average transfer speed of exactly 17 Mbps fifty-fifty as Speedtest.net showed the network offered 67 Mbps.
Restoring our one.4GB of video files from Carbonite took approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds. According to Speedtest.net, our connexion provided sixty-Mbps download at this time, while Carbonite delivered the files at 21.ane Mbps.
Carbonite's upload speed was by far the slowest in our testing. Information technology took 45 minutes longer than the next slowest service, IDrive, and more than twice the upload time of the fastest option, Backblaze. Download speed was a different story, with Carbonite finishing squarely in the middle of its competitors.
During the initial backup process, the Carbonite application used an boilerplate of approximately 3.3 pct of our Lenovo Yoga C940'southward CPU resources. Usage fluctuated between 2 percent and 6 pct throughout testing.
This was the second-highest consequence, but it'due south not unreasonable and was a marked improvement from the 7% system hitting I saw the final fourth dimension I tested this service. Most importantly, Carbonite Safe'due south CPU usage dropped to below i% post-obit the initial backup.
Carbonite Safe: User interface
The chief control console for Carbonite, like those of many of the online-backup services, is mainly merely a condition screen for your backup. Y'all have admission to your settings, file retrieval and account data.
Settings options are basic, just covering your backup schedule so a few boosted features.
Backups can be ready to happen continuously, which will back up any new or inverse files within 10 minutes. Y'all can besides choose to have backups happen once a twenty-four hours at a prepare time or simply exclude the hours when you don't want backups running.
There are only 3 other settings that you tin can toggle: the flagging organisation, which I will explicate in a moment; whether to include Carbonite'south default file types in the backup; and reducing Carbonite's internet usage, which throttles the speed of your uploads.
The flagging, or "colored dots" system as Carbonite calls it, warrants further explanation. I was impressed with this characteristic when I last reviewed Carbonite Prophylactic, and the fact that no one else has replicated information technology is quite surprising. It makes agreement your fill-in condition incredibly simple and intuitive.
When toggled on, this colored-dot organisation will place either a full green, total orangish, or half green dot on all of the folders and/or files that you have selected for backup with Carbonite.
A full green dot indicates the file or folder has been backed up, full orange ways the file or folder is selected for fill-in and is pending backup, and half a dark-green dot means that some of the files in that folder or its subfolders are backed upward and others are not selected for fill-in.
Restoration of backed-upwardly files is handled entirely through the Carbonite Safe spider web interface — the desktop application simply links to that page from the command panel.
The web interface remains a fairly out-of-appointment file picker, but it does the chore, allowing yous to select multiple files easily in a listing or icon view. You lot can download up to five,000 individual files or up to 10GB at a time and it will only download them all immediately as a zip file.
Carbonite Safe: Mobile apps
In late 2019, Carbonite removed its mobile apps from both the iOS App Shop and the Google Play Store. Updated versions of the apps had been expected sometime in the second one-half of 2020, but a Carbonite representative told the states there was "no current timeline" for their return.
Instead, Carbonite recommends using the company website through a mobile browser. You can download files that style, merely the site is not designed with this in heed and is maddening to navigate and employ from a mobile browser.
Considering that Carbonite once had very clean and easy-to-use mobile apps, this situation is disappointing and made all the worse by the lack of a timetable for the apps to be replaced.
Carbonite's Courier Recovery service will send you your data on an external drive. This is available on all levels of service, only Carbonite Safe Prime customers become a steep discount.
For Safety Basic and Safety Plus customers, the price of this service is $99 per estimator each time you utilize information technology; with Safe Prime number, information technology'south only $9.99 per occurrence (although expedited shipping for Safe Prime users is some other $19.99).
You have 21 days afterward receiving the drive to return it to Carbonite, or yous will be charged $130 for a drive less than 3TB or $300 for more than a drive than 3TB.
Courier Recovery is a great service to avoid excessive downtime in an emergency, just unless you plan on using it at least once a twelvemonth, then in that location'due south no reason to opt for Carbonite Safe Prime. The cost of Carbonite Safe Plus along with a single Courier Recovery usage every two years will be less expensive than paying for two years of Safe Prime with an expedited Courier Recovery.
The Courier Recovery service is also considerably more expensive than comparable offerings from Backblaze (which refunds all but the cost of return shipping as long equally you render the drive) and IDrive (which lets you practise this for free in one case per year on a Personal plan and is only $59.95 for additional occurrences).
Carbonite does offer the ability to utilise your personal encryption key, which steps up the at-rest encryption from the default AES-128 standard to the stronger AES-256 i, something that more than security-witting users will appreciate. Most other online-backup solutions use AES-256, with the exception of Backblaze, which merely offers AES-128.
Do be enlightened that y'all must make the decision to use a personal encryption key when you first back up your data, and that it will prevent you from using the aforementioned Courier Recovery service. And if you lose that fundamental, you're on your own.
Carbonite also offers two-gene authentication (2FA) for your account, requiring verification of a code sent to your smartphone via SMS whenever yous log in from a new computer. While this is preferable to nothing, this isn't our preferred method of 2FA and I would love to run across Carbonite implement a more secure option.
Carbonite Prophylactic review: Bottom line
From a value standpoint, information technology is hard to recommend Carbonite Safe, fifty-fifty though it works just fine. There's simply nothing compelling enough almost what Carbonite does to recommend information technology over Backblaze as an unlimited cloud-backup selection. From a feature standpoint, Carbonite is miles backside IDrive.
Carbonite was acquired by the enterprise cloud company OpenText near the finish of 2019, which may be why the mobile apps were removed. I hope this is a sign that changes are coming to make Carbonite a stronger choice again, only until those changes come, I would recommend looking elsewhere.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/carbonite-safe
Posted by: codycoved1936.blogspot.com
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