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Does Carbonite's unlimited backup storage include data on other drives?
Posted by Caitlin on April 20th, 2009
The following post in our Reader Question series is an actual user submitted question. To maintain the integrity of the original question, we do not edit or change reader questions in any way.
Q: Does Carbonite's unlimited backup storage include data on other drives (D, E, etc., which are either internal or external) in addition to the C drive?
A: By default, Carbonite backs up everything in your Documents and Settings folder, as well as all of your music. The default backup does not include programs, system files, temporary files, videos, or individual files greater than 4GB. You can manually add any of these, from any internal hard drive, to your Carbonite backup. Carbonite does not guarantee support for external hard drives, and we have heard conflicting reports as to whether or not it is possible to successfully back up an external hard drive with Carbonite.
Mozy, another of the online backup services reviewed on NextAdvisor.com, does back up external hard drives.
To learn more about Carbonite, Mozy, and other online backup services, see our reviews and comparison chart.
10 Responses to “Does Carbonite's unlimited backup storage include data on other drives?”
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April 25th, 2009 at 8:41 am
I beg to differ with your response to Caitlin's post of 2009-04-20, regarding Carbonite backup of external hard drives.
Carbonite will only back up *internal* (IDE or SATA) hard drives. I have an external USB hard drive, and Carbonite won't back up anything that's on it.
May 3rd, 2009 at 7:34 am
I agree with Jimmy. I did a Carbonite trial and was disappointed that the progam would not backup my external hard drive. I emailed Carbonite and was told at this time they do not support external drives.
May 15th, 2009 at 7:21 am
Alex: That’s correct, we don’t back up external drives. The problem is that external drives are not always connected to your computer. Carbonite is a backup service, not archiving. People who do archiving charge by the GB, not unlimited. When you delete data from your PC, it gets deleted from the backup. When you unplug your external hard drive, are we to assume that you no longer want that data and is it ok for us to delete it? If not, how long are we supposed to keep it? If the answer is “forever,” then it turns us into an archiving service. In a few months we will have a version of Carbonite that will back up external drives and network drives, but it won’t be unlimited for a fixed price.
Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
David Friend | Chairman & CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
334 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02116
617-587-1110
July 13th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
David, you made this statement:
"When you delete data from your PC, it gets deleted from the backup."
Am I missing something? Isnt that what data back-up is supposed to protect against? If I accidentally delete data or if a drive dies, would Carbonite assume I purposefully deleted it?
I understand not backing up network drives as it opens you to be backing up entire office networks, but the statements above are a little concerning.
July 17th, 2009 at 8:51 am
David, I understand your general argument against archiving, and I fully understand that your system could be flooded by users with large server farms who try to back up everything for a (low) fixed fee. However, I recently bought a 1 TB drive to add to my system, as a "local" backup drive, and your "rules" seem to say that if I had bought an internal drive, Carbonite would back it up, but because I chose to buy a USB drive, Carbonite will not. Clearly, this makes little sense.
It seems to me that you would be better to distinguish "archiving" from "backup" by function, not by drive configuration. It seems like this should mean that backed up files should "disappear" from the Carbonite servers, within a certain time (a week? a month?) after they disappear from the local drives. This is what Mozy does, although I find that their system is still very buggy.
What I do is use the 1 TB drive as a LOCAL BACKUP, which is done incrementally every night. What I want to use the unlimited Carbonite (or Mozy) for is to create an off-site backup of the "LOCAL BACKUP drive", not my "used all the time drive". If disaster happened to my "LOCAL BACK drive", and I had a fixed time period (a week? a month?) to restore IT from the off-site service, that would be more than enough. My real purpose in having off-site backup is to protect myself against a fire or other home disaster when I am away. My local backup takes care of inadvertent deletions and hard-disk failures.
As to Dalton's comment of July 13, 2009, I kniow that Carbonite keeps the files after they disappear from the local drive. Dalton, if you look at the info on the Carbonite virtual drive, you will see that such files remain there, but are flagged with a message to the effect that "the original file has been deleted". I try to clean up my Carbonite virtual drive by deleting those files, although I confess that I am not as dilligent as I could be!
August 28th, 2009 at 3:27 am
David, I'm glad you're reading and responding here. I tried Carbonite, and have two 'stoppers' for me – the first is the issue here with external drives. I'm backing up to a drobo (*great* product!) so I'm pretty solidly covered for drive failures locally. But not for fire/theft/drobo-failure. So I want to back up my on-drobo files to online backup. Alas, drobo is an external drive…
The other stopper is even more important to me: I have to specify each kind of file to back up. Oh, *horrors*!! What if I miss one, or some new product I install uses some new file extension and I forget to add it to the backups? I want to backup *everything* by default so I don't miss anything! Let me *remove* things from the backup (and it'd be fine for the installer to ask if I really want to back up *.tmp, ~*, *.bak, etc)
Before anyone argues you'd have a million copies of Windows XP/Vista/7 backed up, if you've done the data storage right (uh, in my rather arrogant opinion of 'right'…
you'd only have one copy of each file, and a million *references* to that one copy.
I'll throw another drive internally and image the drobo onto it to satisfy the internal-only issue, but *please* let me set Carbonite to just plain back up everything!
I really wanted to use Carbonite because you're local (I'm in Needham) but the risk of missing some obscure – but important – file because it's got some odd extension is just too much for me.
December 25th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
I don't know if this comment thread is still alive, but Jeff has echoed my exact sentiments in his July 17th post above. I just bought a 1 Tera SATA drive yesterday to set up just this sort of arrangement. I plan on handling backups from 3 machines locally to this single drive and then just pushing a copy of that off site. So what I'm wondering is, Jeff, what service did you ultimately use for your solution? And how is it working for you?
February 10th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Sorry David R, I have been so busy, I haven't followed up on this thread lately.
Since my last post, I switched to "Mozy Home" and dropped Carbonite. Mozy has the best structure for me in that it backs up my external drive, and "purges" files on a regular basis. The price per year is comparable to Carbonite.
Unfortunately, Mozy is full of bugs, and their "chat-only" help is too slow, and not very competent. They tend not to listen to the details I supply, and throw a bunch of "generic" solutions (e.g. reboot, reinstall, take two asprin and call me in the morning!). I have struggled to get the system working repeatedly, comsuming whole days of time, but it continues to fail sporadically – not an encouraging sign for the future. They can't seem to handle large files such as those that occur with a zipped full backup. I know it should take days to transfer such a file, but with their current system, it fails to move anything.
I just bought a new PC with a 1 TB internal drive, and am using my 1 TB USB drive as a local backup, so I just decided to dump Mozy and go back to Carbonite. I will back-up the other computers on my network to both the internal and external drives on my "primary" system, since the data sets there are relatively small. That way, Carbonite will cover everything, hopefully with no further problems.
For local backup I have been using Geniesoft, but their off-site storage is way too expensive. Their integration is a great idea though.
February 24th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
The lack of support for external drives will cause me to cancel my just-acquired Carbonite service.
I, too, bought an external drive of 500GB, and I moved the Users directory, and most applications and "My Document" folders directly to it.
It is not inside the machine, but it is virtually a required part of my computer. I DON'T remove it when the computer is on, which is almost 24/7.
March 18th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
I just subscribed to Carbonite and paid the annual fee. Now I realize I can not backup my data, because they are located on different drive. I am an advanced computer user and do not keep my data on system drive, because that would not be smart. Now reading from the postings above. Looks like I have to call Carbonite and cancel my subscription if the service is not able to backup data on different drive. I just email their tech support. Crossing my finger for descent response.
-Sean T.