I decided to try out Carbonite for online backup of a desktop PC. The machine has a 160 GB solid state C: drive and a 2 TB traditional hard drive. After 1.5 months, Carbonite is about 74 percent done with the initial backup (about 300 GB total?). The seasonal pace of the backup isn’t a serious problem for me, but the fact that the software has built up a 31 GB log file on the C: drive is. WinDirStat (awesome free software) shows that this single carbonite.log file is now larger than all of Microsoft Windows 7. I spent two hours this morning in chat with Carbonite support (in Lewiston, Maine) and was eventually simply disconnected. I tried another couple of hours on hold with their technical support phone line, but never reached anyone with any technical knowledge.
I’ve tailed out this log file and it doesn’t seem as though it could be useful to a computer program. It has entries such as
1330816462 # 7336:Backup progress: completed 1%, file counts last 1:41:31 A ll: 42 (490M bytes) Unique: 42 (490M bytes), Compressed: 499M bytes. 1330816462 # 7336:Backup progress: remaining 12 days, file counts All: 1030 722 (174G bytes), Pending: 290 (58G bytes). 1330816476 # 6824:Pending file "K:\AdobeMediaCacheFilesFromCDrive0076.MTS 48000.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214382-G1-V1:V1). 1330816476 # 7224:PutFile: Backed up part 1 of file/folder "K:\AdobeMediaCa cheFilesFromCDrive0075.MTS 48000_1.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214380-G1-V1, 129 bl ocks). 1330816476 # 7224:Backed up file "K:\AdobeMediaCacheFilesFromCDrive0075.M TS 48000_1.cfa" (C3463626-S3445-F1214380-G1-V1:V1), size 8M, sent 10M (126%). 1330816479 # [Activity] 7232:CPU usage: 0% process, 3% system 1330816479 # [Activity] 7232:DISK usage: 366892 bytes/sec process, 644193 b ytes/sec system 1330816509 # [Activity] 7232:CPU usage: 0% process, 2% system 1330816509 # [Activity] 7232:DISK usage: 139762 bytes/sec process, 37003 by tes/sec system 1330816512 = 18:15:12
I’m reluctant simply to delete the file, however, because I’m afraid that it might cause Carbonite to start over and throw away 1.5 months of uploading. The software does not seem to have any settings where one can specify that a drive other than C: be used for logging.
Thoughts on this? Or suggestions of an alternative to Carbonite that won’t result in unchecked consumption of C: drive space?
[November 1, 2012 update: After seven months, Carbonite has managed to back up 384 MB of data and still has 88 MB to go. Buried deep within the Carbonite web site, very far from anyone making a purchase decision, is a disclosure that bandwidth is throttled at 100 kbps or 1 GB per day. So while Carbonite technically is “unlimited” in its ability to back up a desktop PC, it will take 2000 days (5.5 years) to back up a standard 2 TB hard drive. A photographer who captures more than 40 digital SLR RAW files per day will never be backed up. A parent who takes more than 8 minutes of HD video from a compact digital camera (AVCHD format) per day will never be backed up. Carbonite never developed a fix for the “creates huge log file on C: drive” problem, though maybe it is by design. If Carbonite itself fills up the C: drive then the user can’t add too many photos and videos!]
You should be able to back up much faster…
I use Crashplan for my three home machines plus the home NAS (Synology). I’m backing up about 1 TB of data. The initial upload sustained 4 to 5 Mbit/s per system. It’s costing me about $120/year flat fee.
If you want to decrease the initial seeding duration, you can get a hard drive from Crashplan, copy your files to it, and then mail it to them.
I don’t know anything about online backup systems, but as is often the case with technology, don’t let the 1.5 month deter you from starting over. The right program, once you find it, will do what you want in two days, or however long it takes to upload 400gb nowadays.
What about Dropbox?
I use Backblaze on my Mac and it backed up about 500 GB initially in about a week and has kept up with my additions flawlessly for about a year. I have found the Backblaze software consumes very little resources. I have no experience with Carbonite or any other backup service.
Brian: Why not Dropbox? I am a happy user of Dropbox, but I think their largest subscription is for 100 GB. It isn’t designed as a dumping ground for videos, camera RAW files, etc., is it?
If the file is still that large after the first incremental backup, and this is a real issue for you, then you probably want to use another service. But Crashplan is double the cost, so that sounds like a last resort to me. I use Carbonite and have been very happy their service so far. I like that they have been around for a long time, so they are not likely to disappear overnight. Also, I enjoy their web interface to my backed up files, which includes search and thumbnail preview for images.
Another vote for Backblaze. They also give back to the community by sharing some of their hardware “designs”:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
You did not specify the most important piece of information: what kind of Internet connection do you have? On the average DSL, you can only upload a couple of gigabytes per night, which means it would take 5 months to upload your backup set. Cable is faster but will almost certainly throttle you unless you have a business-class plan.
Cloud backup is not a viable option if all you have is the third-world speed that passes for broadband in the United States of Comcast-Verizon-AT&T.
I use rsync to backup to a computer I keep at work, from midnight until 6am when it is killed if it has not yet completed, and when I have a file that’s too big to be sent in a night, I will sneakernet it using a USB disk drive.
Another back blaze recommendation. $5/month unlimited backup with a snapshot taken at daily weekly and monthly intervals. I’ve installed back blaze on at least 10 macs and haven’t seen a problem. Initial sync takes about a week.
Use JungleDisk. Much more power user friendly.
We also use CrashPlan at the day job. I’ve never seen it use an annoying amount of resources (CPU time or disk space). I’ve also yet to try recovering something from it…@Trekker, have you?
I haven’t used Carbonite, but I tried twice to use Mozy (now owned by EMC, I believe.)
Both times I ended up frustrated with the uploading software which seemed to take forever and sometimes ended up taking way more CPU than seemed sensible for a simple backup program.
I ended up spending more money by going with Jungle Disk. More money because Jungle Disk uses Amazon S3 for storage, so I pay about $25 a month for something like 150 gig (I think) of backups. But unlike Carbonite and Mozy, with Jungle Disk you can back up as many machines as you want under your one account. The Jungle Disk software is reliable and unobtrusive, and has even done a decent job with the case where I’ve moved all my data to a new computer – it did have to check all the data, but was able to realize that it had all my files already up on S3 without re-uploading them.
My bottom line opinion: you get what you pay for.
I would agree with your assumption that the log file is just that, and not a backup index or other important piece of metadata. I might try renaming the file and rebooting to see if the backup process starts over or resumes…and rename the file back into place if anything untoward happens.
I use tarsnap for online backups because they are the only service I’ve found with a believable encryption model.
Fazal: What kind of Internet connection? Verizon FiOS with 5 mbps upload.
I stopped Carbonite, deleted the file, and restarted it. Now the log file is only 500 MB in size. It seems to contain a lot of error messages such as “Serialized SD for [filename] is empty” and “Failed to get metadata file name for file [filename]” and “Failed to get checksum for [filename]”.
I guess you already stopped it, but i would’ve attempted truncating the log file first. But i don’t know what the equivalent of a unix cp /dev/null /path/to/logfile would be in Windows
Does anyone here use Iron Mountain’s services? What do you think of them?
They used to be a local company called Connected. I am thinking of switching.
@Naseer You said “they have been around for a long time, so they are not likely to disappear overnight” regarding Carbonite. However, they’ve just injected themselves into a political situation, removing advertising from the Rush Limbaugh show over an insult delivered on air. The same insult was delivered by another radio host that Carbonite advertises with (Ed Schultz) but they did not pull advertising in that case. Their motives are obviously political. I imagine that it will have an effect on their future business (especially since there are many competitors that deliver services as well or better than they do).
I’ve restored ~10GB as a test from Crashplan and it worked fine. Primarily I use Acronis for bare-metal backup of my local machines and most restores are via that route instead of the cloud.
I was running JungleDisk on my WHS with Amazon S3 as a back-end, but it was costing me >$100/month. Crashplan is much more cost-effective.
I went with Crashplan over Carbonite, Backblaze, etc. because Crashplan allows me to back up my Synology NAS to their service.
+1 for Crashplan. Features I like include custom encryption keys, backup to local drive as well as cloud, and keeping historical versions of files. Cost is only $140 for 4 years of unlimited storage.
Another vote for Backblaze. I use it on both Windows XP and Mac OSX 10.7 without issues so far.
When I tried out Carbonite and Carbonite Business I found that they throttle the upload rate after your backup set got over a certain size, which was a problem for me. I have Comcast fiber so my guess is my upload speed is about the same as yours. It shouldn’t be taking you a month to do a 300GB backup.
I switched to CrashplanPro and found I had full bandwidth even when my backup set was north of 300GB. Also Crashplan Pro give me backup sets which are useful for what I do.
The TOS of Crashplan say you can’t use it for business, that’s why I went with CrashplanPro.
I also tried BlazeBack too, but found it too tedious to configure the way I wanted. But if you are going to be selective and backup everything then it should work for you. I had upload issues with BlazeBack too, but don’t rememeber the details.
Elsa-
We use Iron Mountain’s Connected Backup/PC here at the large defense contractor that employees me. I have personally been quite happy with the service the two times I’ve needed to restore data. The initial backup ran for about 4 hours on a fresh laptop, then it takes about 5-10 minutes every day to keep up.
Adding another suggestion to the mix (with disclaimer that I am affiliated with the company, so please refer to reviews or trials before taking my word for it), but ElephantDrive is an alternative for online backup and sync.
It supports Windows (XP and forward) and Mac (10.4 and forward), does not throttle bandwidth, and utilizes Amazon Web Services for back end.
Related – does the Berkman center have any plans for symposia on cloud storage and related questions of law? Would be of great interest to me.
Whatever backup solution you are using, you need to help it with your backup; you cannot just tell it to backup all of your hard-drive.
What I have been doing for years (15+) is partition my hard-drive into at least 5 partitions:
C drive (for OS installation only)
D drive (for application installation only)
E drive (for work related data)
F drive (for general data)
G drive (temporary stuff, including Windows page-file and all of its temp’s)
On the D drive, I have 3 folders, Apps, Devs, Docs. So any time I install a new application, I don’t use Windows default, instead, I use either D:\Apps or D:\Devs
With this setup, the only thing I need to backup is what’s on E and F drive — which is far smaller and will help you setup your backup system.
In addition, if my OS need to be rebuilt, or I need to re-install an application, I can do so with minimal destruction (just have to re-install the OS and any application that was on D) Furthermore, this setup helps me clearly identify which installed apps are where and what they are consuming. Sure, some will still place part of their binaries on the C drive, but I can find those easily.
I second Crashplan. Move to them from Mozy and very happy. Have 1.5TB on their servers now. Best of all – they allow you to seed new backup by sending them a drive **and most importantly** if you need to restore all your data, they can send you a drive by mail.
I use a BlacX box and a set of three 2TB USB disk drives. One drive goes inside my PC, one goes in the BlacX drive mount, and one goes in a safe-deposit box at my bank. rsync takes typically about 1 minute to back up everything (roughly 1 TB though rarely more than 10 GB changes). I run this backup every day to both the internal and external drives. About once per month, I swap the external drive with the one at the bank. If my house burns down or the machine is stolen, I expect to lose about 2 weeks of work. If the power-supply in the PC flakes and takes out all the disk drives, the one on the external BlacX box survives — that’s why I use an external drive too as I lost everything once due to a power supply failure that took out my main and backup drive.
My Internet connection (1.5 Mbps) isn’t fast enough to backup a day of photo and/or video shooting where another 5 GB accumulates. USB 2 or 3 is over 100x faster. Also, rsync is simple, open-source, software that works. No need to spend time waiting on a support line.
I use Amazon S3 coupled with JungleDisk. Been using that combination for years on MacOS, just recently on Windows.
One very nice thing about this arrangement is that you can set up JungleDisk to make the backup in such a way that the files are accesible using any S3 client, not only with JungleDisk.
To me, that’s essential.
why won’t you splurge on a tape backup?
Joseph: A tape backup sounds great as long as I also want to hire someone to load up tapes every few days and then drive them to an offsite storage facility afterwards.
I’ve used Backblaze and Carbonite. Backblaze is better than Carbonite, but neither is very good if you acquire any respectable amount of data.
For example, I shoot with a Nikon D90, and keep both JPG and RAW files. This adds up to some 15MB per photo. Hard drive space is cheap, and unlimited online backup is similarly cheap, but it takes a lot of time to upload those images even on a 3-5mbps cable connection. Most of the overhead to Backblaze and Carbonite was ensuring I wasn’t sending duplicate data to their online storage after I had disconnected the laptop from one connection and reconnected it to another.
If you have modest data requirements, any of the online backups are adequate. If you actually create a lot of digital media, local backup is really the only practical solution. I dropped Backblaze and attached a WD 1TB MyBook drive to the Airport Express and used it as a Time Machine backup. That is my “why not?” backup solution.
The real solution was to buy two hard drives of the same size as my internal HD and use Superduper to replicate the hard drive over the fastest port on the laptop (Firewire 800). This makes my backup a completely bootable version of my internal hard drive, so a meltdown will only put me back a bit. I can put one drive in a fire safe, or can keep offsite. If I exceed my internal capacity, I buy (three) bigger hard drives and keep moving.
I have relegated some data to online storage systems, like Flickr or AWS, but that’s a decision made on a case-by-case basis.
I have reached the practical limits of keeping everything, forever, in my home directory. The best path forward, as far as I can tell, is to buy or build a file server with redundant drives and/or filesystem (ZFS, or similar) that also rsyncs to some kind of cloud storage like Amazons EBS.
I suspect Carbonite’s primary sin is that it cannot depend on something like a unix syslog, and thus its homegrown logging facility is well abused. Backblaze was much more docile in my experience, but it is just as useless as all the other online backups if you generate much digital media.
tl;dr– http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html
WARNING: Carbonite does NOT back up video files unless you select each one individually. Just being in a folder which is getting backed up is not enough for Carbonite to back up video files. It will skip them. In my opinion, this alone makes Carbonite useless.
I’m a happy CrashPlan user. CrashPlan has the nice feature that you can back up your computers to each other or to friends’ computers for free. If you have computers both at home and at work, they can back up to each other giving you an off-site backup where you also have physical access if you need to do a full restore fast. If you have non-technical friends who don’t understand the value of backup or don’t want to pay for it, you can easily let them back up their tiny (but valuable to them) data to your computer and then be their savior if a disaster happens. CrashPlan even works on Linux as well as Windows and Mac.
Phil, if that is your experience trying to back up your data, when time is not that big of an issue, I wonder how their recovery process would work out. There’s a bunch of horror stories (old ones, for sure) here: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/carbonite-steps-up-the-competition-in-online-back-up/ and here: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/03/25/more-on-carbonites-data-loss/
not trying to convince you, but presuming this PC is at your home, just wonder if rotating a couple of LTO tapes and storing one in a decent safe (e.g. Graffunder http://www.graffundersafes.com/ and the likes) is really more of a hassle than dealing with crapware on your PC and troublesome service.