WHy I'm probably not going to use Carbonite any longer

In the past I've blogged about carbonite - an online backup service. At the time, and for a while afterwards I recommended it to friends and family.

However it's come to the point where I feel I can no longer recommend it - to be fair some of this is due to my usage requirements becoming more sophisticated, but then I think this is a general trend in any case

1. Customer Support

When I first used carbonite support was excellent - responding often in a matter of hours, and rarely more than a day. However during the last few months I've encountered some difficulty where the response time to a support email has taken around 10 days - indeed one response took more than double that.

I don't have an issue with getting difficulties from time to time, but it's how support deals with these issues is key.

2. Performance

My actual problem related to high CPU when carbonite was running. Much (50%?) of the time, even though throttled upstream the carbonite process would spin cpu. looking at the logs perhaps suggested the cause might be the file monitoring that was going on. However it effectively rendered my system useless. Note -- I was originally using vista, and then "upgraded" to W7 beta. The problem symptoms didn't change.

3. NAS/External disks

I started off with just local disks on a Windows PC. Easy, fully supported by carbonite. I then purchased an external drive. Carbonite did not support this so data on that drive could not be backed up. I then started using a Buffalo Linkstation NAS device, with both internal & usb attached disk. Again carbonite would not support that - either via a mapped drive or *crucially* by running the application directly on the nas.

4. Multi machine/user

Whilst most of our family data is now on the NAS, including documents, photos, music etc, there are remnants of config files etc spread around 3 or 4 systems. I'd like to backup those too without having to replicate to the NAS. There's also 4 users in the family.

5. Multi operating system support

I run Windows, Linux (fedora, ubuntu, various embedded), Symbian at home. It would be nice to access backups from all these locations

6. Access to files from alternate client - ie picking single file when not at home

Given the culimation of these issues carbonite feels like a lost cause for me. Now whilst many services do offer "nas" support or multi machine support, NONE I've found offered all of the above.

For now I'm using Amazon S3 - signed up to my own package, and using custom+open source scripts (I'm a techie so that's ok) in conjunction with local replication. I've lost multi version support, and the price has risen (0.15 USD/Gb)

So all I would say is consider what you need carefully