striplar
Registered: Jun 2010
Posts: 1 |
06-19-10 08:58 AM
Beware, this product may appear to work but in my experience falls far short of realistic expectations. I have this on two Windows 7 computers and they both have the same issues.
The initial backup went smoothly if a little slowly.
After a while, I double checked to make sure that my critical files had been recently backed up after being changed. Although some had, a lot of them had not.
I contacted Carbonite but their answer was pretty useless. All they say is that your backup is proceeding normally. Apparently they are unable to tell you what was backed up in the last 24 hours for example. All they can tell you is that since a particular date a long time ago, so many bytes of data have been backed up. Useless!
The log file which is accessible on each system is almost unreadable but with some perseverance, I found that it was trying to back up huge files recorded from the DigiTV card and loads of other unimportant stuff.
I then went through the whole computer and explicitly told it not to back up any of that stuff, only leaving the critical files and folders for it to back up.
It still doesn't work properly. Files are left in the 'pending backup' state for months until I tell them to be backed up ASAP.
I have fed this specific information back to Carbonite and they are not replying.
So the message is clear. If you want the comfort of the illusion of this kind of backup, Carbonite is for you. Just don't expect your recent data to be there when you system dies. At best, it's about as much useful as doing a complete system copy every few months.
If you think your Carbonite installation is ok then check out the backup status of a file that you know you changed a couple of weeks ago.
Besides the fact that it doesn't work, what is desperately needed is another icon in the Carbonite drive window that shows what was backed up recently. If this information was available, it would have been a lot easier to spot that things were horribly wrong.
In principle, this is a great idea. Now all they have to do is to make it work.
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