Disadvantages of Online Backup
My approach to marketing any product or service I have ever worked with is to be frank about it. It probably doesn’t please everybody and paints me slightly negative but people have so many avenues to research products that simply ignoring that your product’s weaknesses is a flawed strategy, in my opinion. So in saying all of this, I wanted to list some of the key disadvantages of using online backup.
Speed
Many people complain that it takes far too long to backup your drive using online backup. I would have to agree that in Australia the upload speeds are relatively slow and particularly slow if you have cheap ISP plan or are backing up during peak times of the day. Carbonite states that you can backup up to 3GB per day. So if you had 30 gig which is about the average, it would take you a minimum 10 days. Now let me say that I have seen some people surpass 3GB per day but most don’t. Most do about half that and so 30GB would normally take 20 days.
Is there anything you can do to speed the backup process. There are a couple of things. First is to leave your PC running over night so that Carbonite has as much opportunity as possible to complete its work. The second thing is to review the internet plan you are on and see if you can upgrade for a month whilst your backup is in progress.
The 3rd thing you can do is stagger the backup over a few months.
The beauty of Carbonite is that after the initial backup is done, the rest of the backups are incremental. So they should be pretty much instantaneous.
Yes, hard drives are much faster than online backup because there is no internet to travel across. The data simply travels across the wire connecting your PC and the hard drive. In most cases, 30 minutes is all it takes to backup 30 GBs.
Restoring
The next disadvantage is restoring speeds. This issue is also linked to the first one. I was reading through a small business forum I regularly visit yesterday, and read a post by a PC repair person spelling out that downloading 100GB via an online backup service could take a very long time. He was right it certainly wouldn’t be done in a day. Carbonite downloads at about 10-15 GB per day. Your download speeds are also much faster than your upload speeds which makes it much faster than uploading.
Again, compared to having an external hard drive sitting next to your PC that you can simply plug in and transfer the files, online backup is slower. Internet speeds in Australia are going to get faster, whether the NBN hits your home or not in the not too distant future. Both ISPs and Carbonite are always looking at ways to improve the experience of their services.
The best way to manage the download process is to prioritise your restore focusing firstly on the files you need NOW. Obviously you are not going to need all of the 100GB right there and then. Carbonite lets you prioritise your restore using its smart restore wizard.
If you are organised enough to use more than one form of backup eg hard drive and online backup, then you can use your hard drive to restore your data. Your online backup can then be used as a fall back should your drive fail (and trust me they do).
Data Centres are Overseas
Carbonite’s data centres are in the US. Best to be upfront with that. How does this disadvantage you? If you need to visit the data centre, bringing in a spare drive that you wanted to dump the data onto, you can’t do this. Even if Carbonite offered this service, the time that it would take for you to send the drive to the US and to retrieve it wouldn’t be worth it.
Some people say that upload speeds would be faster if the data centre was local. I am probably not technical enough to know the answer to this one. Certainly it would cost your ISP a lot less to send and access this data for you if the centre was local, but this doesn’t impact you.
Honestly, unless you have some legal reasons that require the data to store be stored locally, then whether it is overseas or not shouldn’t really matter. With so much more going into the cloud these day, you will get used to the fact that some services are going to be sitting on your PC not on your desk.
In terms of safety, the bigger and more successful the company, the better and more secure you are. More resources means greater controls and processes to protect your data. It also means more hands on deck should you need assistance. Overseas online backup services offer this, but so do local ones. Do your research.
In terms of price, economies of scale play a big role with the price of online backup services. It’s not simply you get what you pay for, ie because it’s cheap it’s of lesser quality. Services out of the US are cheaper simply because there are just so many more people that will access the program from there. Local Australian online backup services simply don’t have the opportunity to get scale. The only companies in my mind that can do this are someone like Telstra or Optus with their millions of customers. Given their record for over pricing services, you are not likely to ever backup your entire PC online for $72 pa.
Bandwidth Surcharges
When I first started at Carbonite I heard a lot about this. People being stung during the initial upload service because they have uploaded more than their allocated bandwidth for the month. Yes this can happen but I can honestly say that I had probably 2 customers in over 2 years that had to pay their ISP additional fees.
Internet plans are always improving in Australia, you only need to look at the introduction of unlimited plans over the past 6 months to see this. So your options here are to upgrade to a plan that gives you more bandwidth at least for the month you are uploading your initial backup or to stagger the backup over a few months, starting with your most important files first.
External Drives
Why doesn’t Carbonite also backup external drives? The simply answer is that Carbonite’s pricing is based on the average size of your internal hard drive and the average amount of data a PC stores on it. Most online backup services work the same way. If we were going to also allow for external drives then the pricing would need to be adjusted accordingly.
For customers who need to have an external drive backed up, we now have CarbonitePro. It does local, external and even network drives.
A new service that I saw one of our competitors release recently, was the ability to have your online backup service instruct your PC to also backup to a local (internal/external drive). This concept sounds appealing to me, particularly for our more organised users.
If you are a small business, you should be backing up locally (external drive) as well as using online backup as a 2nd defence.
Set & Forget
How can there be a disadvantage with set and forget. This isn’t really a disadvantage with Carbonite nor online backup, it’s called becoming lazy. Technology breaks and in most occasions it may have nothing to do with the tool you are using. So the risk I see with installing Carbonite and simply saying “there, it’s done, no more need to worry about backup again” is that if Carbonite should stop working for whatever reason, you will never know. Carbonite has flags to tell you it isn’t working but you should be checking anyway. Remember Carbonite is just a tool. It’s your data, your business and your responsibility to stay on top of it.
So there you have it, the main disadvantages of online backup as I see them.
