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Tom's Guide Verdict
Carbonite Prophylactic provides the basics and does them well, but you'll pay a lot for the features you actually want.
Pros
- +
Unlimited storage
- +
Clever and intuitive backup flagging system
- +
Courier service is great for emergencies
Cons
- -
Base plan is fairly expensive
- -
Odd and frustrating restrictions
- -
Weak upload operation
- -
No mobile apps at present
Carbonite Safe: Specs
Number of devices backed up per subscription: Up to v computers
Storage limit: Unlimited
Backups of tethered external drives: Ane drive, with Plus or Prime plans
Backups of network storage drives: No
Backups of mobile devices: No
Operating arrangement/application backups: No
Backups to local drives: No
Two-factor authentication: Yes
Bulldoze shipping: Restore simply
I wouldn't count unlimited storage infinite equally a must-accept feature for a cloud-backup service, simply it is nice to accept. Carbonite Safe starts with a bespeak in its favor there, yet while all services with unlimited storage take some limitations, Carbonite'southward are the nearly restrictive.
This detriment, coupled with Carbonite's high prices, particularly for those who need to regularly back up video files, makes Carbonite Prophylactic a tough recommendation among the best cloud backup solutions, despite a number of excellent UI elements that I would dear to run across others adopt.
(Carbonite has temporarily slashed prices on its Safety plans past 30%, but they're still a bit more than comparable offerings from rival services.)
Consumers craving a unproblematic online backup solution for a unmarried auto should consider Backblaze, while anyone with more than than one machine to back up volition want to look at IDrive.
Let'southward have a closer look at what Carbonite Condom has to offer and see whether this even so might be the correct solution for you.
Read on for the rest of our Carbonite Safe review.
Carbonite Safe: Cloud backup services defined
Online-backup services, or cloud fill-in services, brand online copies of all the personal files on your reckoner. Some of these services can also support system files, applications, smartphones, tablets and external hard drives. Most offering unlimited (or lots of) storage for a flat subscription fee, and some (but not Carbonite Prophylactic) can also make local backups to an external hard drive.
These aren't the aforementioned as online-syncing services like Dropbox or OneDrive, which create copies of specific files and push them out to all your devices. It would price too much and take also long to utilize a syncing service to dorsum upwardly all your files.
If you have thousands of photos, videos, or music files you want backed up to a safety location, a cloud-backup service is what yous need.
Carbonite Safe: Costs and what's covered
Carbonite has a slightly confusing cost construction, depending on your needs, and the company has drastically reduced the incentives for multi-year subscriptions.
The lowest tier, Carbonite Rubber Bones, comes with unlimited storage infinite for $six a month, but you lot have to pay that annually ($71.99 per year, temporarily discounted to $58.99 for the outset year).
You can besides get a slight disbelieve from the total price by paying for two years ($136.78, 5% off) or three years ($194.37, 10% off) at a time.
These are prices for a single computer, and you'll pay the full toll for each additional automobile. (Carbonite does offering a 15-day free trial.)
Carbonite Safe Plus brings you upwards to $111.99 per year, currently discounted to $83.99 for the first year. (It's $212.78 for two years and $302.37 for iii.) This plan adds both the ability to include i USB-tethered external hard bulldoze in the backup and automatic backup of video files. (Backing upwards networked drives is not available with any Carbonite consumer plan.) It too includes Webroot antivirus software.
Condom Basic users have to individually select videos to back them upward, and across all three Carbonite subscription levels, yous will need to individually select files over 4GB for backup.
The most expensive programme is called Carbonite Safe Prime and it reduces the cost of Carbonite's Courier Recovery service from $99.99 per instance to just $9.99. This service copies your files over to a physical bulldoze and ships information technology to your home address in the event that you demand to recover a large number of your files. The cost for Safe Prime is $149.99 for one yr (discounted to $104.99 for the first yr), $284.98 for 2 years or $404.97 for three years.
The best straight comparing to Carbonite Safe Prime is Backblaze's bones programme, which for $70 per twelvemonth backs up a single PC, including video files and attached difficult drives, and includes a similar drive-shipping recovery service that you can utilise for free up to 5 times per year.
That's an $lxxx savings each year versus the comparable Carbonite plan, enough to become yourself a nice external hard bulldoze if you don't already accept one.
Let's say you, instead, have 3 machines to support. Carbonite Safe Bones would cost up to $216 per year, but you still won't go automatic video backups or the free courier service.
IDrive could cover all 3 computers (under a unmarried account) and give you both of those missing features (includes ane free yearly employ of the courier service) for $79.l per year for 5TB of fill-in space, or $99.50 per year for 10TB.
Carbonite Safe and its Plus and Prime number versions run on Windows 7, Mac Bone X 10.10 Yosemite and later versions of both operating systems. At the time of this review, Carbonite did not offer mobile apps.
Carbonite Safe: Performance
We tested each cloud-backup service using a Lenovo Yoga C940 fourteen-inch laptop with a tenth- Gen Intel Core i7 running Windows 10 Dwelling house 64. Mobile apps were tested on a Google Pixel 3 with Android 10. Each service'south software was uninstalled from both devices before another service's software was installed.
Our test set of files to back up consisted of 15.6GB of documents, photos, videos and music. We uploaded this data to each deject-backup service and so restored a i.4GB subset of these files to the Lenovo Yoga C940.
We used the GlassWire application to monitor upload and download speeds and the congenital-in Windows Resources Monitor to track CPU usage.
We conducted our tests in Middleton, Wisconsin, using TDS Telecom Extreme300 Cobweb home internet service, which theoretically provided up to 300 megabits per 2nd (Mbps) down and 300 Mbps up. Existent-globe speeds were typically closer to l Mbps down and 60 Mbps upwards, according to Speedtest.net.
| Acronis True Prototype | Backblaze | Carbonite Rubber | CrashPlan for Small Business | IDrive Personal | |
| Initial upload speed | 26.iv Mbps | 36.iv Mbps | 17 Mbps | 27 Mbps | 25.1 Mbps |
| File-restore speed | 13.1 Mbps | 27.5 Mbps | 21.1 Mbps | 34.four Mbps | 12.4 Mbps |
| CPU usage during backup | >i% | two.five% | three.3% | seven.iii% | 1.2% |
| CPU usage otherwise | >1% | >i% | >ane% | >1% | >ane% |
Our initial upload of the 15.6GB of files to Carbonite's servers took approximately 2 hours and 21 minutes, with an average transfer speed of exactly 17 Mbps even as Speedtest.net showed the network offered 67 Mbps.
Restoring our 1.4GB of video files from Carbonite took approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds. According to Speedtest.net, our connectedness provided threescore-Mbps download at this time, while Carbonite delivered the files at 21.1 Mbps.
Carbonite's upload speed was by far the slowest in our testing. It took 45 minutes longer than the next slowest service, IDrive, and more than than twice the upload time of the fastest option, Backblaze. Download speed was a different story, with Carbonite finishing squarely in the middle of its competitors.
During the initial backup process, the Carbonite application used an boilerplate of approximately 3.3 percent of our Lenovo Yoga C940'south CPU resources. Usage fluctuated between 2 pct and 6 pct throughout testing.
This was the second-highest result, merely it's not unreasonable and was a marked improvement from the 7% system hit I saw the last time I tested this service. Nigh importantly, Carbonite Safe'due south CPU usage dropped to below ane% following the initial backup.
Carbonite Condom: User interface
The primary command panel for Carbonite, similar those of many of the online-backup services, is mainly just a status screen for your fill-in. You have admission to your settings, file retrieval and business relationship information.
Settings options are basic, just covering your backup schedule and and so a few additional features.
Backups can be set to happen continuously, which will back up any new or changed files inside 10 minutes. You tin can too choose to have backups happen once a day at a gear up time or simply exclude the hours when you don't want backups running.
There are only three other settings that yous can toggle: the flagging system, which I will explain in a moment; whether to include Carbonite'southward default file types in the backup; and reducing Carbonite'due south internet usage, which throttles the speed of your uploads.
The flagging, or "colored dots" system as Carbonite calls information technology, warrants further explanation. I was impressed with this feature when I last reviewed Carbonite Safe, and the fact that no one else has replicated it is quite surprising. Information technology makes understanding your fill-in status incredibly unproblematic and intuitive.
When toggled on, this colored-dot organisation will place either a full green, full orange, or half light-green dot on all of the folders and/or files that you lot accept selected for fill-in with Carbonite.
A full green dot indicates the file or folder has been backed upward, full orangish means the file or folder is selected for backup and is pending backup, and half a light-green dot means that some of the files in that binder or its subfolders are backed upwardly and others are not selected for backup.
Restoration of backed-upwardly files is handled entirely through the Carbonite Condom web interface — the desktop application only links to that page from the control panel.
The spider web interface remains a fairly out-of-date file picker, but information technology does the job, allowing you to select multiple files hands in a list or icon view. Y'all can download upwards to five,000 private files or up to 10GB at a time and it will simply download them all immediately equally a nada file.
Carbonite Safe: Mobile apps
In belatedly 2019, Carbonite removed its mobile apps from both the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. Updated versions of the apps had been expected sometime in the second half of 2020, merely a Carbonite representative told united states there was "no current timeline" for their return.
Instead, Carbonite recommends using the company website through a mobile browser. Y'all can download files that fashion, but the site is non designed with this in mind and is maddening to navigate and use from a mobile browser.
Because that Carbonite one time had very clean and piece of cake-to-utilize mobile apps, this state of affairs is disappointing and fabricated all the worse past the lack of a timetable for the apps to be replaced.
Carbonite's Courier Recovery service will ship y'all your information on an external drive. This is available on all levels of service, but Carbonite Safe Prime customers get a steep discount.
For Rubber Bones and Safe Plus customers, the cost of this service is $99 per computer each time y'all utilize it; with Safe Prime, information technology's only $9.99 per occurrence (although expedited shipping for Prophylactic Prime users is another $xix.99).
Y'all have 21 days subsequently receiving the drive to return it to Carbonite, or you lot volition exist charged $130 for a drive less than 3TB or $300 for more a drive than 3TB.
Courier Recovery is a great service to avoid excessive downtime in an emergency, but unless you lot program on using information technology at least once a year, then at that place'due south no reason to opt for Carbonite Prophylactic Prime. The cost of Carbonite Safe Plus along with a single Courier Recovery usage every two years will exist less expensive than paying for two years of Prophylactic Prime with an expedited Courier Recovery.
The Courier Recovery service is also considerably more than expensive than comparable offerings from Backblaze (which refunds all but the price of return shipping equally long as you return the drive) and IDrive (which lets you do this for gratis once per twelvemonth on a Personal plan and is but $59.95 for boosted occurrences).
Carbonite does offering the ability to utilise your personal encryption cardinal, which steps upwardly the at-rest encryption from the default AES-128 standard to the stronger AES-256 one, something that more than security-witting users volition capeesh. About other online-backup solutions use AES-256, with the exception of Backblaze, which merely offers AES-128.
Do be enlightened that you must make the conclusion to use a personal encryption key when you first dorsum up your data, and that it will forestall you from using the aforementioned Courier Recovery service. And if you lose that fundamental, you're on your ain.
Carbonite also offers two-factor hallmark (2FA) for your business relationship, requiring verification of a code sent to your smartphone via SMS whenever you log in from a new reckoner. While this is preferable to nothing, this isn't our preferred method of 2FA and I would love to see Carbonite implement a more secure pick.
Carbonite Safety review: Bottom line
From a value standpoint, it is hard to recommend Carbonite Safe, even though information technology works merely fine. There'due south simply nothing compelling plenty about what Carbonite does to recommend information technology over Backblaze every bit an unlimited cloud-backup option. From a feature standpoint, Carbonite is miles behind IDrive.
Carbonite was acquired by the enterprise cloud company OpenText well-nigh the end of 2019, which may exist why the mobile apps were removed. I hope this is a sign that changes are coming to brand Carbonite a stronger option again, but until those changes come up, I would recommend looking elsewhere.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/carbonite-safe
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