Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 20 March 2008 01:57
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Sounding like something that Han Solo was dipped into, Carbonite is a
simple online backup service that promises to just work for XP and
Vista PCs, and it’s just landed on Australian shores – without Darth
Vader or Lando Calrissian getting in the way.
Carbonite is a US company that has come to Australian offering one simple product – an online backup service that integrates seamlessly with Windows XP or Vista, with the killer feature of truly unlimited backup storage for AUD $5 per month – including GST.
Distributed in Australia by Avalanche, the same company that also locally distributes the AVG Anti-virus and Internet security solutions, Carbonite’s “Online PCBackup” makes a few interesting promises.
They say that it is “the simplest and most affordable backup service on the market today”, with advanced “set and forget” capabilities which mean users “never have to think about manual backups again”, running continuously in the background, encrypting and compressing your data before sending it to Carbonite’s secure data centre in Boston.
Carbonite also promise to ‘never slow down your PC’, and because of the unlimited data aspect, you won’t need to decide what is really really important to backup – you can simply backup all your data files from your hard drive and be confident of not running out of room.
As you’d expect from an online backup company, they offer some ‘backup facts’ to show why consumers should backup regularly – no matter which solution they choose, be it to Carbonite, to a competing online service or to a simple external hard drive.
The stats include the figures that 79% of computer users rate their data as ‘valuable’, 40% rate it ‘priceless’, 63% backup less than once per month and 23% never perform a backup at all.
On top of that, 2GB of personal data is lost every minute of every day, while 750,000 laptops are stolen each year.
Carbonite chose an unlimited figure for data, understanding that 64% of respondents had ‘no idea’ how much data was on their PCs, that 82% hated choosing between files they really have to save when connected to a service with a limited file size and that 91% “do not like” scheduled backs at all.
Carbonite is designed to make a backup of your normal user files, including email files. Impressively, it can also backup ‘open’ Outlook files which normally can’t be backed up when in ‘open’ mode, which happens when you’re in Outlook and don’t want to turn it off just so you can make a backup.
Naturally it also stores documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, music, videos, Internet favourites and more, although the system isn’t mean to be used to take an entire snapshot of your hard drive as an image to store on the service.
So what won’t Carbonite do, and what’s it like in operation? Please read onto page 2.
