As online backup services proliferate and the cost to back
up a gigabyte of data steadily drops, we are regularly asked about really
inexpensive solutions, particularly Carbonite.
We do not recommend Carbonite for our clients. Here's why:
1. Carbonite only maintains one copy of your data. If anything happens to that single copy, your backup is simply gone.
2. We've found numerous online complaints about Carbonite's support and system performance, including these recent examples:
-A customer who was unable to restore 75% of his data after a crash.
-A customer who lost access to a 300Gb+ backup for seven weeks.
-A customer who struggled to get a response from Carbonite support after his backup stopped working entirely.
3. Carbonite is unable to back up a live Exchange or SQL database. This alone should be a deal breaker for business users! Carbonite itself acknowledges this is an issue and suggests that you back up your database using another tool, then use Carbonite to back up the back up. We’ve found that this doesn’t work very well. For one thing, it doesn’t allow you to verify that the third party backup took place. For another, a full Exchange backup is so large and takes so long that you'll probably only manage one offsite backup per month — one per week, if you're lucky.
Considering other offsite backup options? Give us a call. We’re
happy to help.
