Carbonite

Dear Tim,

Thank you for reaching out to me.

I have used Carbonite for years. I even roped friends & family into the service.

Everything was GREAT until I needed you.

My new Surface Pro 4 crashed and I lost everything.

Microsoft sent me a new machine … and I thought that my fabulous Carbonite service would get me up & running in no time.

I appointed a computer engineer to do the work for me as he has ultra-fast wired broadband.

FIFTEEN days later – numerous telephone calls/emails to Carbonite and I received my SP4 back.

Why?

Well, Carbonite does not send out hard drives outside the USA.

Carbonite throttles the delivery speed (even though it says it doesn't) — we tried to get it quicker in several places btw …

Carbonite customer services offers a service but just not for customers in need.

Needless to say, a bill for USD975 from the computer guy (all the calls to the USA) PLUS lack of help from Carbonite adds up to one thing – GOODBYE Carbonite … and subsequent emails to friends & family as a warning.

I note that I have wasted an hour of my life reading reviews of Carbonite online and all the negative reviews have a familiar tone.

Carbonite needs to do a LOT better.

Carbonite is not a tool to consider if you need to back-up more than a few Gigabits of information. They throttle their uploads, so even if you leave your computer on for days you are unlikely to back-up more than a couple Gigabits a day. The more you back-up, the slower it goes.

It is going to take me months to back up my family videos. Carbonite is not "video friendly" so one has to go through each video file individually and select it for back-up manually.

I have also returned from trips hoping to see significant progress only to see the client " searching for files to back-up" instead of uploading.

For the price of an inexpensive external hard drive, you are better off backing up ALL your data in minutes and throwing the drive in your car in case something happens.

Users who want to back-up less than 10G are better served by Google drive or the other free cloud services.