I received a pleasant call from a Reseller this week who was enquiring about his wife’s Carbonite subscription. He had purchased a 12 months subscription which expired on May 11 2011. For whatever reason he had missed the renewal messages/reminders and had renewed the subscription a month or so after it had expired. He subsequently found that his original data had been removed, ie he needs to begin his backup again.
What I thought we would do this week, is run through what actually happens when your Carbonite trial or paid subscription nears its expiry.
The Australian Carbonite website offers a 30 day trial subscription which you can access completely free of charge. All you need is an email address and a password. Once you have installed Carbonite it will begin its backup. The process will usually take you a couple of weeks. Carbonite will backup at most 3GB per day, therefore depending on how much data you have it could actually take a bit longer.
We specifically chose 30 days understanding that most Australian internet accounts have generally slower upload speeds compared to our friends in the US who only have a 15 day subscription. We believe that 30 days should give you plenty of time to experience exactly what Carbonite does plus backup most of your data.
Following the installation and setup of Carbonite you will begin to receive a series of email communications from the Carbonite Australia team. They will provide you with information about how Carbonite works, what to look out for and who to contact should you need assistance. As your trial nears its expiry, the emails will begin to focus on your pending renewal or purchase of a paid subscription. You may also notice that the Carbonite icon in your systems tray will begin to tell you that expiry is coming soon.
The messages from your Carbonite icon should get ‘louder’ as the expiry day nears and even louder after it has passed and you haven’t subscribed. In fact they should be popping up so you can’t miss them.
After about a week of no action from you, your Carbonite account is then cancelled and your data deleted. Yes, all gone. Should you need to get access to that data, you can’t. In fact should your trial account pass the 30 day trial period and you want access to it, you will need to buy the subscription first.
A very similar process occurs with a paid subscription. As the subscription nears its expiry, in fact 30 days out from it, you should begin to receive emails reminding you that you will shortly need to act. You may also receive an incentive to do so.
The Carbonite icon in your system tray will also pop-up and tell you about your pending expiry.
Once that expiry period has passed, you have 30 days in which to act before your data gets deleted. If you miss this then there is no turning back. The Reseller that called me today had missed the expiry reminders. The subscription had unfortunately been expired for more than 30 days so the data had more than likely been deleted. Given he had now renewed the subscription his only option was to start again.
If you wish to check when your subscription ends simply look into your Carbonite Info Centre (click Green Carbonite Icon in your system tray). Using the left menu select about. Your screen should look something like this.
Keep an eye out for when your subscription is due to expiry. If you need help with renewing then please give the Carbonite Australia team a call on 1300 88 66 73.
In last week’s post, I wrote about a few tips that could be quite useful should you be planning on leaving home over the Christmas holiday season. In actual fact protecting your property is just as important day in day out when you are leaving home to go to work or simply going to your local shopping centre.
Right after I posted the post last week, I received a tweet from a follower who directed me to a video on Gizmodo. “What happens when you steal a hacker’s computer”. Seems like it’s actually a recent video.
What is quite interesting about it is that it’s a story about how a PC hacker worked out how he could track his lost Mac after it had been stolen from his apartment. Interestingly enough the guy telling the story is an Australian living/working in the US.
It’s not a short video but if you have a spare 20 minutes it’s worth a listen/watch. In a sentence or two, the story revolves around retrieving his stolen property and the lessons this guy learns along the way about how to prevent someone from stealing it in the first place as well as how to protect your data.
His detective skills are quite remarkable (maybe not so much for tech junkies). It’s obvious his Mac meant so much to him after he had had it stolen. This is usually the case for most people when they have lost their data, they will spend $$$ to get it back and months trying if they have to. It is only then that they learn the lesson of protecting your data and or hardware.
In this guy’s case his background should have taught him better, although he did have backups in place there was no online backup, just local. His backups were in the same room as his Mac and they were also stolen. He does admit that a $20 dead bolt would have probably prevented the whole saga (but then we wouldn’t have the story).
Services like Carbonite make it so easy to protect your data. It’s just $6 per month to subscribe to Carbonite. Some online backup services give you a free few GB’s per month, so why wouldn’t you just try it. It will save you heaps in the long run because your PC will eventually fail. Mine has failed three times since I was introduced to Carbonite.
The beauty of online backup is that it is instant. Today I moved 150 photos (2GB) from my SDHC card to my PC. The pictures were added to a sub-folder within my Pictures folder. Within minutes of adding the pictures green dots were appearing everywhere. I looked through the pics and saw photos of a loved one that we lost this year, I would be devastated to lose those pics.
I hope you enjoyed the DefConVideo, I certainly did.
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.
Those of you out there manually backing up using CDs and DVDs to protect all your previous files are in for some bad news. Having spent a lot of time and energy backing up, imagine how frustrated you would be to discover years down the line the data you ‘protected’ by backing up has been lost due to the deterioration of its disc.
After testing the longevity of portable media, results showed discs designed to last for centuries rarely lasted longer then five to ten years, and in some extreme cases merely a year! Additionally, the results revealed the life span of a disc can be artificially aged by heat, water and light, increasing its vulnerability.
This is potentially a big issue for both consumers and businesses. Jerome Duc-Mauge, an executive producer of documentary films, is not fully confident in manual backup.
“This is a big drama, this issue of how long these pictures will last. We don’t know. The manufacturer says to us, ‘Yeah, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years’.”
The question is which would you choose for your ‘digital life’ insurance? A time-consuming process with a short life span? Or online backup, which automates the process and ensures you can always backup an unlimited amount of data that can not be lost to theft, fire or father time.
If you’re reading this, you’re most likely already a Carbonite subscriber. But if you’re also using CDs and DVDs to backup, make sure you’re double backed up and, as the researchers suggest, you’re “spreading digital data rather than keeping it all archived in one place.”
I did some competitor analysis today and found out that one of our major competitors has released a new backup feature which I think is really useful except they have limited it so much that it only makes it half as good as it actually could be.
Without speaking in twists and turns, the competitor is Mozy and the feature is the ability to do a local as well as online backup at the same time.
There is no doubt that having both a local as well as remote backup option is the best backup plan that you can have. In terms of what you put into either is really up to you but obviously the things that will take longest to retrieve and you are most likely to need immediately, you should also keep locally.
The problem I find with this new feature is that the online backup software is the one controlling the backup for you. What this means is that unless you are organised enough to have the hard drive connected all of the time, you are unlikely to get the most out of this option. Maybe it forces you to keep it connected which probably isn’t a bad thing but it can make your desk areas quite messy.
The second issue I found with the feature is that if you delete a file from your local hard drive, not only will it eventually disappear from the online backup (Carbonite does this as well) but it will also be deleted from the external hard drive. ie I can therefore only assume that it is doing a full backup each time (not incremental), replacing the old with the new. Or maybe it is treating your local external drive like the server and managing the files in it for you.
The way Carbonite manages this on the server side is to check if the file is also being kept locally. If it detects that you have deleted it from your hard drive, Carbonite will tag the file and then if it still hasn’t returned to you PC after 30 days it clears it off the server. They essentially do this because Carbonite is an online backup service (and is priced this way) not a storage facility.
So should you delete a file from your hard drive, you will not have it stored online nor will you have it stored on the hard drive. I don’t like this. The other thing is that depending on the amount of data you have on your PC, the backup process could take a while (assuming it is doing a full backup each time). You could also run the risk of the hard drive filling.
Also I wonder what would happen if the hard drive failed. Would Mozy tell you that it wasn’t working?
What I would have preferred to see is that you have the option of deciding which files get backed up online, offline or both and when this occurs. This gives you greater control of where you have your data. It should also be doing some monitoring of the drive. Telling about space consumed and available and checking that it is all working OK.
Maybe these features have already been thought of. Maybe they will get picked up from user feedback. Hopefully Carbonite Inc is also listening and will consider doing something better and more useful for its customers.
All in all, it’s great to see new features coming out, even if they are from competitors. It makes us all want to work harder and deliver more for our customers.
Keep an eye out for when your subscription is due to expiry. If you need help with renewing then please give the Carbonite Australia team a call on 1300 88 66 73.