After a few weeks, Carbonite hit about 60GB and was only adding about 1 GB per day.
A real shame. Maybe the business plan is different, but there was no doubt that it was throttling back on the backup.
So now I threw away my $59. Spent forever doing uploads and looking for another off-site backup cloud / plan. Anyone using or like CrashPlan. I’ve read good things about it so far.
In the middle of the night, I saw that the thing wasn’t backing up at all anymore… even after a reboot which I almost never have to resort to on the mac…
So frustrated, and after reading a bunch of stuff about Carbonite and what they really offer – I trashed the app and started looking around for something else.
I came up with CrashPlan. I read many comments from users who said that they actually gave you what they offered – and that they didn’t start slowing the backup etc. at some point…
And so I installed the trial of CrashPlan in the middle of the night… and it has a lot more features than Carbonite. If they do what they say they’ll do – then they should be okay.
I’ll do a brief writeup about how they work on my mac once I’ve had some time with them.
Here’s the link for you guys — www.CrashPlan.com
And goodbye to Carbonite – you have ripped me off – so no more business from me. Too bad. Had you simply said upfront what you were offering – that would have been one thing. Or if you have a plan that offers a steady throughput – that’s another thing – but it should be spelled out upfront.
Dave I use Crashplan as well. Took a month to upload my whole archive, but it works like a charm.
Hey James — good to know. I expect it will take forever to upload but I’m okay with that. I just want to know that I’ve got the important stuff off-site and that it can keep up with changes that I make etc. Carbonite must have been running for a month at least… They really pissed me off with that game.
I also use Crashplan after doing research about what other photographers were using for backups. Took about a week to upload 500GB but that’s fine. Highly recommend them.
crashplan is great, especially with the upload speed of TimeWarner wideband… it took a while to upload countless GBs, but it was well worth the switch from S3. crashplan’s software is stable and allows one to backup multiple computers. i.e. my laptop gets backed-up to my desktop and then to crashplan. same with the girl’s machine
For uploads I removed the throttle and get about 5MB/sec upload speed with encrypted data. crashplan has proven to be foolproof and bulletproof at the same time. retrieving files from the back-ups is easy and painless.
Markus – how much do you pay for TW wideband. Right now I just have broadband. I continue to find CrashPlan working well and yes, as you say – has many more options for local backups as well. In fact, I could backup to your computer if you allowed it :)
I just upgraded to TWC Ultimate. I don’t think that’s wideband, but it’s faster than what I’ve got now which doesn’t get much faster than 450 kbps for uploads. Ultimate is supposed to give me up to 768 kbps for uploads. Just an extra $10 a month over what I’m paying for now. And 5MBPS for downloads.
Of course downloads have not been a problem – though if I ever had to do a restore – it could come be useful.
Dave,
what about BackBlaze? Also, if you can get FIOS it will get you 10MB or more of upload speed.
Don’t know BackBlaze. I CAN’T GET FIOS! I wish I could but it still isn’t in this area. I check them out every few weeks. With 10 MBS of upload speed – I would be in backup heaven!
CrashPlan is excellent! Much more robust than Carbonite. I’d guess that Carbonite is fine for the average personal back-upper – but for a professional photographer – uhm – not if they throttle back your speed at some unknown point without telling you upfront that they’re doing that. Bad, bad practice.
I used to have TW “turbo” with 768k up, still too annoyingly slooow. wideband is a little shy of $100 month, which gives us 50mbs down and 5mbs up… not spectacular, especially for video, but perfectly workable for photos and incremental uploads.