Carbonite Fail

In my post about recently losing all of my files due to a hard drive crash, I mentioned that i opened up a Carbonite account for online cloud backups. I had about 200gb of files to backup, and from everything I read it said it could take a while to do the initial backup. They were right about that!

After almost 2 weeks of running Carbonite, it had only backed up 51gb of my 200gb. On top of all of that, it was using between 95-100% of my CPU. My computer was almost useless when it came to programs like Photoshop or Photos. I finally got sick and tired of it and contacted Carbonite Support this morning. It was truly an exercise in futility.

First the tech told me it was my Firewall that was preventing my upload from completing. Wrong. Next it was that my computer falls asleep. Wrong. Then he told me that it was perfectly normal for it to use 100% of the CPU. Wrong. They tout their service as working in the background with no impact to your system, but clearly this was not the case. Finally he said that the only way he could help me more was to connect directly to my computer to look at my system setting and to make some changes. Over my dead body he will!! I told him that was totally unacceptable and he pretty much said there was nothing else he could do. But he was wrong about that — he could process a refund for the 1 year subscription that I paid for. Surprisingly, he did that — or at least he said he did. I did get an email confirmation saying that the refund was being processed and I should have it in 24-72 hours. If I don’t see it by then, it’s time to raise some hell.

In the meantime I am looking at some alternative online backup services. The one I am trying out right now is called IDrive. I am using the free version with 5gb of storage right now, but so far it seems pretty nice. It uploaded a small batch of files very quickly and without any strain on the CPU. It has settings for either continuous or scheduled backups. The pricing is pretty reasonable as well. I’m going to test it out for a week or two and if I see value in it, I’m going to order a year’s subscription and see how it handles all of my data.

This is what the Carbonite Tech called ‘normal’.