Online backup: Carbonite?

wellman · July 11, 2006

I wandered across this online backup service tonight and wondered if anyone has any experiences to share. Carbonite claims to back up a user's entire PC (unlimited, they say) for $5/mo. The service monitors your network usage and continually uploads new/updated files when your machine is idle. They also encrypt automatically, I believe.

Link: http://www.carbonite.com/

Thoughts, opinions?

-Greg

wxwax · July 11, 2006

I like the idea.

But I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that strangers have access to all of my info.

wellman · July 11, 2006

wxwax wrote:

I like the idea.

But I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that strangers have access to all of my info.

Agreed. I wonder whether they're encrypting before or after the data is transferred. It looks like even though the data is 1024-bit Blowfish encrypted, Carbonite maintains a copy of the key, meaning "certain employees" have access (link).

I suppose one could encrypt files locally, which would translate into garbage for any unfortunate Carbonite-employed snoopers, but that does seem a hassle...

ivar · July 13, 2006

wellman wrote:

Agreed. I wonder whether they're encrypting before or after the data is transferred.

It's done before the upload: http://www.carbonite.com/howitworks.aspx?

wholenewlight · July 13, 2006

Right now, I manually mirror my digital photos on a separate internal HD (I keep a couple of versions). Some of my shots are on Smugmug. No real CD's of DVD's used for backup.

But with everything on-site, a fire in my house could destroy everything. My stuff isn't particularly valuable - only to me.

Carbonite seems interesting. But I would still need to go through all my files and toss out all the junk pics. I've got about 45gb of files. Even with Carbonite it would take weeks to get it all backed up. Look at this guy's experience:

I did have some questions about the service. First it took about 16-17 days to back up my roughly 19 gigs of files. I was told that Carbonite was having some issues that made the transfers go much slower than expected and they even extended my trial a few days so I could see if it finished. It did finally finish, I noticed an improvement in throughput as well.

http://blog.larixconsulting.com/blog/_archives/2006/6/23/2051361.html

wxwax · July 13, 2006

I have three external HD's for piccies. Not sure how to keep backing them up - three more drives? That's a lot of drives.

I've been puzzling about this for a while.

colourbox · July 13, 2006

Just for context, online storage is an exploding area right now. I'm looking for a solution that will store encrypted data and allow sharing files with friends/family/business colleagues, and just looking around in the past week turned up new startups like box.net, ElephantDrive.com, and jungledisk.com, which hooks up with the Amazon S3 storage that smugmug is now also using. Apple .Mac could meet my needs, but I don't want to pay $99/year when I only care about the iDisk part of the service and they only offer 1GB.

I am taking a wait-and-see on it until there's more data on these services. They are just too young and most are still in beta, building out their services. There are so many new ones that you know there will be a shakeout. You don't want to upload your stuff to the service that goes out of business.

The first company to provide an encrypted solution that allows easy sharing AND lets me mount the server on my OS X desktop as a volume that I can run my file sync software on, at a better price/GB ratio than .Mac, is the one I'll sign up for.

claudermilk · July 13, 2006

wxwax wrote:

I have three external HD's for piccies. Not sure how to keep backing them up - three more drives? That's a lot of drives.

I've been puzzling about this for a while.

Here's the scheme I've recently come up with. Instead of external enclosure, I'm using removable drive trays in the 5.25" bays (2 of them). One is reserved for my image drives, the other for backups. I'm using Acronis TrueImage & have it set for max compression, which gets the backup file to about 60% of hte raw data size. So with equal size drives and not cramming them to capacity I can approximately use one backup drive for every two data drives. Another option is something like a 250GB for data and a 300GB for backup--that should even up the capacities a little better.

This is about the best system I can think of. Other options are CD/DVD, but you end up with lifespan issues and a massive pile of disks; or tape, but that's a PITA and prohibitively expensive...and you end up with a huge pile of tapes (capacities are shockingly small for the cost).

mercphoto · July 13, 2006

Not an easy question to answer

claudermilk wrote:

This is about the best system I can think of. Other options are CD/DVD, but you end up with lifespan issues and a massive pile of disks; or tape, but that's a PITA and prohibitively expensive...and you end up with a huge pile of tapes (capacities are shockingly small for the cost).

I have yet to come up with an archive solution I'm actually happy with. I follow the mechanics outlined in "The DAM Book", mostly, and I'm happy with the mechanics involved. What I'm not happy with is the media to back-up to.

* Hard Disk. Limited life-span and a single point of failure to trash large quantities of data at one time are the negatives. High capacity is also a positive, as is random access and fast read/write times. Don't trust just one hard drive, however. I really do not like the idea of constantly buying new hard drives and moving data from one to the other on a continual basis.

* CD and DVD. Limited life-span, small capacity, slow burn speeds, medicore access speeds are the negatives. The plusses are they are random-access and universal. Technology changes, but I do expect both formats to be readable for at least another 10 years. Don't trust just one CD/DVD however.

* Tape. The negatives are the tape is not random access and cost per gig is high. The positives are very high life-span, very high reliabilty. People worry about whether tape can be read in the future, but given how long we've already had tape... And it appears you can trust having just one tape.

* Iomega REV drive. Negatives are cost per gig and the fact it doesn't appear to be gaining market traction. Positives are very long life span (they believe), random access, fast read and write, relatively high density. It would seem, on the surface, the best of hard disk with the best of tape.

What I'd really like to see, and I have yet to find anyone do all this, is to consider the true cost per gig of these various formats over a 20 year time frame. This will need to include the cost of moving files to new media, both in terms of media cost and in terms of labor cost. For example, REV drive is expensive per gig the first time you copy a file to it. But when you factor in the fact over 20 years you have likely moved data to 6 different hard drives, the cost of that plus the time spent, is a REV drive cheaper in the end? Or tape?

colourbox · July 13, 2006

mercphoto wrote:

* Tape. The negatives are the tape is not random access and cost per gig is high. The positives are very high life-span, very high reliabilty. People worry about whether tape can be read in the future, but given how long we've already had tape... And it appears you can trust having just one tape.

The future-proofing of tapes may be overstated. Tape is tape, we know how to make a tape machine. But there are still points of failure. It isn't like audio cassettes where there was one kind. You need to read the tape with the same type of machine and format that wrote the tape, and you need a driver for that machine that still works on your future OS. And the tape itself does self-destruct over time.

Just ask NASA.

I wouldn't touch a REV because no mass-market removable drive tech has lasted very long, leaving you stranded with cartridges you can't use. I favor hard drives because they are the most compatible and the fastest way to update and migrate. Instead of permanence, I look for ease of maintenance and migration. The failure rate can be ameliorated by multiple redundant hard drives. To guard against having human mistakes or errors propogate across all drives, it's still good to make CD/DVDs of the most valuable data.

wxwax · July 13, 2006

colourbox wrote:

The failure rate can be ameliorated by multiple redundant hard drives.

Which is where I came in. Threee xternals, and three backups - that's a lot of hardrives for a simple amateur photographer.

Frank · July 13, 2006

This market is really starting to explode! List of links at bottom.

I've used Online File Folder (from GoDaddy.com) for about 2 years. At $10 US per year for 1GB, it has been handy for daily archiving of new data. I now scan most paperwork and use iMatch (PC only) for local indexing right along with all photos, which then get uploaded to Smugmug for archival.

I've also been playing the ever-expanding disk drive game for local backups. I do nightly incremental backups to internal disk drives and weekly full backup to a Western Digital NetCenter (ethernet disk drive). I gave up on tapes after a few really bad experiences with Exabyte and top $$ 8mm Sony Data tapes. CD and DVD too slow and small for amount of data.

Anyway, for further perusal:

PC World - July 2006 issue - Store It on the Web (did not include Carbonite)

GoDaddy - Online File Folder

Box.net - Free Online Storage - (Only 1 GB for free)

Or Maybe Smugmug will offer a similar solution??

Smugmug is mentioned in this recent article at InformationWeek.

Link to Amazon S3 service mentioned in previous article.

Happy Archiving,

- Frank

mercphoto · July 13, 2006

colourbox wrote:

The future-proofing of tapes may be overstated. Tape is tape, we know how to make a tape machine. But there are still points of failure. It isn't like audio cassettes where there was one kind. You need to read the tape with the same type of machine and format that wrote the tape, and you need a driver for that machine that still works on your future OS. And the tape itself does self-destruct over time.

Good points. It is still worth noting that tape is still used by lots of large companies for archive use and even for scheduled back-ups. In other words, tape usually gets a bad rap from the consumer world. You cannot trust anything 100%. But if I absolutely had to archive data for long periods of time I really do see tape as a better long-term solution than hard disk.

I wouldn't touch a REV because no mass-market removable drive tech has lasted very long, leaving you stranded with cartridges you can't use. I favor hard drives because they are the most compatible and the fastest way to update and migrate. Instead of permanence, I look for ease of maintenance and migration. The failure rate can be ameliorated by multiple redundant hard drives.

I agree about REV and market penetration issues. Multiple hard disks certainly does guard against failure, especially if some drives are kept at separate locations. However most people talk about how inexpensive hard drives are compared to tape or other formats, and I highly suspect these people are not thinking about the cost of multiple drives in use at one time, nor in multiple drives replacing older drives over time. Or the time and effort to duplicate drives as well.

There appears to be no inexpensive means to archive for long periods of time. You either pay a lot up-front on a system like tape. Or you pay over a period of time by migrating data from media to media.

Rhuarc · June 15, 2007

Well, I'm going to revive this thread in the hopes that some others will see it and post up their experiences. I'm looking at online backup strategies. The 2 I have it narrowed down to are mozy.com or elephantdrive.com

Both of these offer unlimited backup space for between 5 and 10 dollars a month. I'm curious if anyone is using either of these, and which one people think would be the better option.

Thanks!

rdlugosz · June 15, 2007

Just noticed this thread... I've already added my $.02 on another thread, but here's the gist:

I've detailed my backup workflow on my blog & it combines several approaches including a local file server, multiple external hard drives, and the Mozy online system. Your approach certainly doesn't need to be so elaborate; just try to make it automatic - otherwise you'll always be the failure point.

As far as Carbonite goes, I don't think it can compete with Mozy's pricing structure; the same applies for Elephant Drive.

With regard to encryption, most of these services encrypt the data before it leaves your PC, so it shouldn't matter much if you're putting sensitive data on a remote server - it's all just meaningless 1's & 0's to them.

wolfejm · July 1, 2007

Rhuarc wrote:

Well, I'm going to revive this thread in the hopes that some others will see it and post up their experiences. I'm looking at online backup strategies. The 2 I have it narrowed down to are mozy.com or elephantdrive.com

I'll toss in my experience with backup. I had used to Connected.com for a long time, but as I got more into digital photography and added computers to my network the costs became unmanagable. Here's what I wanted from a solution:

1. Automatic
2. Multiple versions of files
3. Support for the 3 machines I have
4. Backups have to be strongly encrypted (preferably file names and contents)
5. Has to include an off-site component to protect agains fires, hurricanes, etc (I live in FL)
6. Has to be conducive to large data sets (by individual user standards, 10's of GB to a couple hundred GB). I was not looking to backup digital video.

The first 4 were all easily satisfied. At the time I looked into the market, the last 2 were much harder to solve. In fact, combining the first 4 and the last 2 were not solvable in a cost effective way. Here's what I settled on, and have been pretty happy with:

1. Dantz Retrospect for Windows (Everything you could possibly want in a backup app, including support for 3 machines. No complex network configuration like ensuring common user names or filesystem rights across boxes. Still, it's not an easy app to configure so you'll need to spend some time with it) (Costs around $100-$150)
2. An external hard drive for the back up media. Dantz writes to large blobs that generally don't change unless it has to prune old versions. I just point it at a directory and tell it to use it for back storage. Works great - more or less endless space.
3. I use Foldershare to sync my backup directory off-site. Since the files are strongly encrypted already & automatically I don't have to worry about who sees them. Some important points about this are that (a) Dantz uses big encrypted blob files to store data file revisions, so neither the file names of the files backed nor their contents are visibile and (b) since the blobs only change upon removing old versions the files are very conducive to being synchronized.
4. I periodically burn a set of DVD's of the last snapshot taken with Dantz.

Step 3 in my process is the weakest link. It required me to find someone to sync with that had lots of space. It also requires them to keep syncing over time. Looking at the new options, I may consider something like Mozy for duplicating my backup blobs. Otherwise, I'm quite pleased with how my setup is working, and the fact that my amortized monthly costs are significantly less than they used to be.

asd · July 3, 2007

Rhuarc wrote:

Well, I'm going to revive this thread in the hopes that some others will see it and post up their experiences. I'm looking at online backup strategies. The 2 I have it narrowed down to are mozy.com or elephantdrive.com

Both of these offer unlimited backup space for between 5 and 10 dollars a month. I'm curious if anyone is using either of these, and which one people think would be the better option.

Thanks!

I recently evaluated Mozy and Carbonite and went with Mozy. Both cost the same, but I think Mozy is available for more platforms (Mac, Win) than Carbonite (Win). Carbonite has a free 14-day trial while Mozy has a free 2 gigabyte account.

The only worthwhile advantage I found in Carbonite over Mozy is that it integrates with Windows Explorer in a very simple way, such that as you browse normally in Windows Explorer you are able to immediately tell which files are currently backed up, which are slated for future backup, and which are ignored.

With Mozy, you have to use their client to set up backups or browse backed up files, losing the context of browsing in explorer. But it is also a much more powerful experience, allowing you to specify rules and backup sets.

As someone noted above, Carbonite keeps your encryption key, which means that theoretically their employees could peek at your data, though their site and support emails claim that the keys are sequestered elsewhere. Mozy gives you the option of letting them generate and preserve your encryption key or setting your own key--generating it (in the local client) from text you enter or even a file you choose. Lose that key and you will never be able to recover your data, but nobody else can peek without your permission either (so long as you trust that the Mozy client is not transmitting your key).

With the extra security of specifying your own key in Mozy comes extra work in recovering data--Mozy generates a zip of the files you request and you download it from their site. You then run it through their decryption utility using your key. It's up to you to move the unzipped file structure where you want it. I believe that Carbonite restores files to their original place in the filesystem.

I am in the process of backing up 90 gigs of photos (raw files are 1/2 of that) and so a Carbonite limitation hit home for me--after your first 50 gigs of uploads, you are limited to a daily upload amount of 512 megabytes forever. Supposedly they have a pro offering in the works that increases the limit, but it was not out in early June when I did my evaluations.

Carbonite continuously scans for changes to back up immediately; Mozy runs periodically at intervals you choose (scheduling is an option).

Carbonite sort of allows you to prioritize uploads (you can choose one or more files and tell it to back them up ASAP), while Mozy backs up in some order you cannot affect. I've gotten around this by changing my filetype filters, letting in the raw files after the jpgs and everything else were in.

Both services answer support emails quickly (but not as quickly as smugmug!

), within a day.

--

My backup solution is to keep an external hard drive around that I plug in once a month to synch my computer's data drive to (I'm lucky in that I don't have hundreds of gigs of data I want to back up yet). When Mozy finishes getting everything online, I'll have an offsite backup as well. I don't do the CD/DVD approach because I know that I will not test them for failure periodically and probably lose data.

wellman · July 4, 2007

asd wrote:

I recently evaluated Mozy and Carbonite and went with Mozy. Both cost the same, but I think Mozy is available for more platforms (Mac, Win) than Carbonite (Win). Carbonite has a free 14-day trial while Mozy has a free 2 gigabyte account.

The only worthwhile advantage I found in Carbonite over Mozy is that it integrates with Windows Explorer in a very simple way, such that as you browse normally in Windows Explorer you are able to immediately tell which files are currently backed up, which are slated for future backup, and which are ignored.

With Mozy, you have to use their client to set up backups or browse backed up files, losing the context of browsing in explorer. But it is also a much more powerful experience, allowing you to specify rules and backup sets.

As someone noted above, Carbonite keeps your encryption key, which means that theoretically their employees could peek at your data, though their site and support emails claim that the keys are sequestered elsewhere. Mozy gives you the option of letting them generate and preserve your encryption key or setting your own key--generating it (in the local client) from text you enter or even a file you choose. Lose that key and you will never be able to recover your data, but nobody else can peek without your permission either (so long as you trust that the Mozy client is not transmitting your key).

With the extra security of specifying your own key in Mozy comes extra work in recovering data--Mozy generates a zip of the files you request and you download it from their site. You then run it through their decryption utility using your key. It's up to you to move the unzipped file structure where you want it. I believe that Carbonite restores files to their original place in the filesystem.

I am in the process of backing up 90 gigs of photos (raw files are 1/2 of that) and so a Carbonite limitation hit home for me--after your first 50 gigs of uploads, you are limited to a daily upload amount of 512 megabytes forever. Supposedly they have a pro offering in the works that increases the limit, but it was not out in early June when I did my evaluations.

Carbonite continuously scans for changes to back up immediately; Mozy runs periodically at intervals you choose (scheduling is an option).

Carbonite sort of allows you to prioritize uploads (you can choose one or more files and tell it to back them up ASAP), while Mozy backs up in some order you cannot affect. I've gotten around this by changing my filetype filters, letting in the raw files after the jpgs and everything else were in.

Both services answer support emails quickly (but not as quickly as smugmug! ), within a day.

--

My backup solution is to keep an external hard drive around that I plug in once a month to synch my computer's data drive to (I'm lucky in that I don't have hundreds of gigs of data I want to back up yet). When Mozy finishes getting everything online, I'll have an offsite backup as well. I don't do the CD/DVD approach because I know that I will not test them for failure periodically and probably lose data.

Thanks for the detailed write-up!

dbinaz · July 15, 2007

Be a year next month that I am with Carbonite. I have no complaints. Their Vista version came out not too far after Vista luanch, which was good for me.
I think I am around 20-25GB right now. Not sure if I will hit that 50GB mark, which btw, I did not know about. But now tat I have a real camera, I may hot that mark.

Derek

jkhasson · December 5, 2007

Mozy, Foldershare and Acronis True Image
Good thread. I too use Mozy and have not had problems with them. The first upload took over a week (30GB+), but now it updates in minutes each night.

I also image my HD to a backup external HD using Acronis for easy access on primary HD failure. I used to do this daily, but now have cut it back to weekly.

I have been using Foldershare to syncronize my laptop photos with my desktop, but have run into a problem recently with FS. My blushing bride decided to rename some of our desktop photo folders for easier recognition of the informaiton (rather than just dates). Overnight, my laptop HD space suddenly was completely full! What happened? Foldershare saw the renamed folders as "new" folders, and copied them all over to the laptop HD. So, I ended up with duplicate copies of photo files on the laptop under different folder names. Then, to make matters worse, Foldershare then saw the "old" folders on my laptop and decided that these were "new" too and then copied them back to the desktop HD. Long story short, I ended up with 2x the photos on both machines, all under both the "old" and "new" folder names.

Foldershare tech support didn't help..."Foldershare does not offer this feature (folder renaming recognition) at this time."

You would think that a folder syncing program would recognize something as simple as a folder rename. But, it doesn't.

Anyone run into a similar issue? Any advice? Maybe the new SyncToy 2.0 Beta?

Thanks.

eoren1 · December 5, 2007

I'll add my plan.
Currently have all photos on a 500gig internal and backup daily to an external. Both kept in close proximity so no good in case of fire, etc.
I reviewed all of the online options and found problems with mozy in terms of retrieving data (download speeds, cost of DVDs).

My friend and I worked out a plan to be put in place over the next few weeks:
Each of us buys an internal SATA drive and backups up all data.
Ship that drive to the other person.
He's placing it in his NAS, I'm putting it in my desktop.
Use SyncBack SE which has a backup to ftp option and do smaller incremental backups nightly.
This will get around issues of privacy - I only need to trust one person with my data. Also, in case of failure, we simply put the drive in the mail and don't have to worry about downloading or ordering DVDs for a restore. Upfront costs of a 500-750 gig drive are about $100 and there are no monthly fees.
Just a thought.
E

Online backup: Carbonite?

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