Reading through my Google Alerts on Online Backup this morning and I came across a post on a forum called OverClockers, you can read it here actually. http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=920953
I did actually leave a post of my own just to clarify Carbonite’s position. Hopefully it is still there and they haven’t considered it as spam.
What is really interesting about this post and another one I found that was dated in mid June of this year, is the number of backup solutions out there and different needs that they satisfy.
There was plenty of mentions for the usual suspects of Mozy and Dropbox as you would expect but there was also a solution offered by one company where staff map a drive from work to their home PC and can then dump as much data as they wanted on it. So the data actually sat at work and acted as a backup or storage for them. The person who mentioned this also mentioned that he was in IT and so it may have been a privilege that only IT staff had.
Not sure what you would do in this situation if work was to retrench you and lock you out of your files within 24 hours. If you couldn’t draw down these files they would be lost forever.
There was also mentions of keeping DVDs at work and using online backup services that connect your to friend’s PC and storage (file sharing facilities). The options are endless and if you had time (and you had an interest) could be fun exploring.
Personally, having tried many online backup services over the years, the thing that really stands out for me with Carbonite is the simplicity of the interface. How quickly can I get it set up and how quickly can I find what I have lost and retrieve it. The final criteria is support. 95% of the world are not tech junkies and so when the PC dies, look to someone else to assist them to repair it. Using a service that only provides you with support from an overseas office is risky, particularly with something like backup. Carbonite is the only foreign provider of online backup services in Australia (a far as I know) that also has a local support office and that can offer you free local phone support during Australian (Eastern time) business hours.
One of the most common concerns that people were raising was the stability of the company performing the backup. It was raised over and over again. As a couple of them pointed out the likelihood that your PC will die and the company behind your backup will go down at the same time is very unlikely. It can happen. In all likelihood however, if the database was big enough, it would be purchased by another company and life would continue as normal. They would then look at how they could bring your data across to their program (which may result in you having to backup all over again). To date I have not heard of this happening, but you can never say never (particularly in this economic climate).
A little more on this note, I wonder how many people ask the same thing of their external hard drive? Will you be around tomorrow? Although a 12 month warranty will come with the drive, there is no warranty on your data. There is a considerably higher chance that your external hard drive will crash and die than there is for one of the larger online backup providers going bust.
Another point made which I actually commented on was the try before you buy. Carbonite offers a 30 day trial and a 12mth subscription. There is nothing in between. Mozy have a pay by the month service, so if you decide you didn’t like it you could leave at any time limiting your financial risk. Yes this is true, However, in the 2+ years that I provided support for Carbonite, if a customer was so unsatisfied with the Carbonite service we would simply give them their money back. So the risk would be extinguished.
The biggest risk you face is not which online backup provider to select, it’s actually not backing up at all.
One of the biggest barriers to entry for online backup in Australia is the poor bandwidth available by most internet service providers. Well this was particularly the case 2 years ago when we launched Carbonite into Australia.
Unlimited data plans where unthinkable. Plans with more than 100GB of upload/downloads may have been available but very expensive. A considerable amount has changed since then. Both the wholesale and retail cost of bandwidth has fallen considerably. The result of this is a significant jump in the bandwidth allocated to most plan including entry level plans. Groups such as TPG have built a huge client base on such plans. As an example you can get unlimited ADSL2+ with TPG for $29.99 who would of heard of such plans in Australia 2 years ago.
With the change in bandwidth pricing we have seen a huge appetite for bandwidth by the consumer market, so much so that internet is now a utility that is just as important as water and electricity in the home.
With so much data going around and such a desire for data, there is absolutely no reason why every consumer with an internet connection should not be using some form of online backup to secure their precious photos.
The challenge however for everyday consumes who aren’t glued to their PC each night after work is that many of them probably haven’t had a chance to upgrade to the better plans or are coming of 2 year plans as we speak and wondering if they should be moving.
I am one of these people, who using Optus has been on a 10GB plan for some time now wondering why I still here with so much data being flown around. What it has meant in my case is that services such as online backup are reserved for the most important files.
During my time supporting Carbonite (and I have mentioned this several times before in this blog), I rarely had a customer complain that their ISP charged them an arm and a leg because Carbonite through them over the line for the month. I really can only recall one case.
I have always advised customers to stagger their online backup in order to avoid reaching their limits particularly in the first 30 days of their backup (ie the first and initial upload).
With my PC crash a few weeks ago, and my use of Carbonite to restore my data, I found my self in a bit of a predicament. I have so far this month used more than 50% of my bandwidth downloading necessary software and updates for my machine which has meant that I have had to be careful about what I back up with Carbonite before the month ends. Needless to say I have upgraded my plan and from 1 Dec will have 50GB at my disposal and so will be using Carbonite to backup a whole lot more than before to ensure that it is ready and available for me should I ever need it again.
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.
Picked up on the following article this morning:
Cablevision, a major broadband provider headquartered in New York, has launched television ads promoting an online backup service — powered by Carbonite. The move targets consumers rather than small business owners. But it’s safe to expect Cablevision to make SMB online backup moves. Here’s why.
Cablevision’s TV ads promote Optimum Online Backup, Powered by Carbonite. The service offers consumers 2GB of free online storage — or enough space to store about 400 songs or about 600 photos, according to Cablevision. But to qualify for the service you need to be a Cablevision Optimum Online broadband subscriber.
Meanwhile, Cablevision also promotes Optimum Lightpath, a business-centric effort that includes managed services, data, voice, video and Internet services. The Lightpath effort also includes business continuity and backup services.
Generally speaking, Cablevision frequently promotes Optimum Lightpath to larger businesses, colleges, universities and hospitals. But it’s safe to expect Cablevision to increasingly target SMBs. I wonder if Carbonite — or another third-party backup service — will play a role.
During my time at Carbonite I have tried to work with countless ISPs to get them to offer Carbonite and online backup to their customers but haven’t had any success. Unfortunately it all comes down to economics, they all have to make a pretty buck out of it (and we don’t have enough to share around).
What astounds me though is the lack of enthusiasm most ISPs have generally shown to services like online backup when in the US, I can point to several partnerships that Carbonite Inc have created, yet we are at Zero in Australia.
As I have mentioned on many occassions via this Blog, as well as through Twitter and many forums etc, the issue in Australia has to do with a lack of education. Everyday PC owners just don’t know enough about backing up their home PCs. Unless they have a techo at home, it just doesn’t happen.
I have generally also found many ISPs not overly interested in even offering anti-virus software. Reading the press this week, there were some recommendations going around that ISPs may be required to stop custmers from using the net when a virus is detected. The liklihood of attracting a virus is actually less than losing a file or all of your files, yet no one is talking about encouraging their customers to stay backed up.
To be honest, several of the ISPs eg Internode and iiNet did show interest but they just weren’t ready for it. It comes down to convincing the Product Managers and their executives that it makes sense to keep your customers secure from file loss. Happy customer is good for everyone I guess.
The results from the US are encouraging though, so I am sure ISPs will eventually embrace online backup in Australia as well.
Walk into any DickSmith or OfficeWorks and you will most probably see them stacked and ready to go, terabyte drives for under $150. Boy is that cheap. It certainly makes you think about buying one. You could store so many photos in it, videos etc, Great for backup?
But is it really? Yes its cheap, but does it make backing up more secure or easier. No it doesn’t. With growing families and less room for PCs these days, most people keep their hard drive in the desk draw (that is where mine is). And once an a while, they remember that they should backup the latest digital photos they downloaded onto the family PC. Unfortunately once and while, isn’t really good enough when you are talking about important information.
The difference between online backup and buying a terabyte drive, is that online backup will do it for you. There is no “remember to grab the drive, plugging it in, finding the files, dragging them across and then congratulating yourself that you finally got around the backing your PC up”. Carbonite simply does it all for you, every day. It’s automated and that is really what is so great about it.
Some of you might say that online backup can’t be used to backup a terabyte’s worth of data. How would you ever get it back if you had to download it, it would take months. They have a valid point. Carbonite, and online backup in general (at the consumer level anyway) wasn’t designed to backup anything and everything on your PC. Sure it can and will do that if you manage it that way, but for the everyday user, it should be used to provide secure backup of your most important files. Your most important pictures, documents, emails contacts, receipts and invoices etc. For many it will be their only form of backup, for others it will be a secondary source.
If you look at purely from a monetary sense, $150 for a terabyte is equivalent to a 2 year Carbonite subscription. But be sure to also factor in the effort that it has saved on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis when the manual backup is performed. What would you prefer to be doing late at night?
