Carbonite offers several different services. The basic Carbonite Home service ($59/year) offers unlimited backup for both Windows and Mac systems. The HomePlus service ($99/year) adds external hard drive backup along with the ability to create mirror images, while the HomePremier service ($149/year) adds a courier-recovery service where a copy of your backup will be shipped to you.
HomePlus and HomePremier are for Windows users only. A separate service, Carbonite Business, offers storage at higher rates for business users.
Carbonite also has apps for accessing archived files on iOS, Android and BlackBerry smartphones.
Carbonite's InfoCenter interface has a clear and easy-to-understand view of your backup status. A nice visual touch is that, like the Mozy software, Carbonite places a dot next to every file that will be affected: Yellow means it's ready to be backed up, while green shows that it's already been backed up. It lacks a log of its operations, though.
By default, Carbonite backs up only your desktop, music, document, photo, settings, email and video files. You can add other specific files, but Carbonite's software balks at including system, Windows and program files.
Carbonite can back up files continuously or on a schedule. The operation remains in the background; a progress bar slowly fills up, giving an estimate of how much time remains.
Once the backup is finished, any archived file can be recovered on the host computer or with a smartphone. Files remain accessible from Carbonite's online server for 30 days after they've been deleted from your computer's hard drive.
Carbonite colocates its server equipment at several data centers throughout the U.S. According to its site, the service uses RAID techniques on its server disks to make sure that a burned-out hard drive in their farm won't take your backups with it. The system uses 128-bit encryption for both online transfers and data storage; it's the least sophisticated security system of the five services I looked at.
Test results
When I performed an initial backup, Carbonite copied 655 files (135MB) and moved them to the company's cloud storage in 27 minutes and 31 seconds.
At a Glance
Carbonite
Carbonite
Price: $59/year (Home); $99/year (HomePlus); $149/year (HomePremier)
Works with: Windows, Mac OS X (Home); Windows only (HomePlus, HomePremier); iOS, Android, BlackBerry
Pros: Can use external hard drive; can have hard drive of backups (Home Premier); able to choose order of file restoration; colored dots show files to be backed up and those done
