I am a Carbonite subscriber. My computer recently crashed. I changed from Windows to a Mac. How do I get my service changed to my new computer?

• Tweet

December 3rd, 2009 - Posted by Kent

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: I am a carbonite subscriber. My computer recently crashed. I changed from window to A Mac. How do I get my serviced changed to my new computer?

A: We've had a number of questions about transferring Carbonite accounts. We covered that a while ago, and you can read our post on that here. According to Carbonite's tech support, you can use your remaining subscription on your new computer.

Your question did get us thinking about whether you could restore your previously backed-up PC data on your new Mac. After all, Macs and PCs have fundamentally different system architectures. It turns out that it presents a problem for data restoration. According to Carbonite's help section:

Due to the differences between PCs and Macs, Carbonite for Mac handles files and subscriptions in a different way than our PC-compatible products do. That means that users unfortunately cannot restore files between PCs and Macs…

We are working to add support for cross-platform restores and subscription transfers in future Carbonite releases.

Don't worry, you're not totally sunk. Until Carbonite works out that detail, you can use a little work around to restore your important PC documents on a Mac:

1) Log onto the Remote Access section of the Carbonite web site.

2) Manually restore your documents, music, videos, etc. using the web interface.

This is not as effortless as the one-button restore you get when you're restoring to the same platform, but at least you can get your important documents back. You probably won't get preferences back, since they're managed rather differently on a Mac.