Comments on: More On the Carbonite Backup Failures

By: Mark Underwood (knowlengr)

Mark Underwood (knowlengr) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:57:14 +0000

For nontrivial problems, there are issues with Carbonite’s customer service, too. See http://bit.ly/UgzOA. They try, but for difficult problems, they simply be swamped.

From what I can see of it, their software isn’t bad, but they’re not giving it a chance.

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:35:49 +0000

Yeah, I use Amazon S3 as an offsite backup storage provider. http://www.JungleDisk.com has an excellent cross-platform client for just $15 that makes S3 volumes appear as a drive letter, plus does some slick folder synchronization stuff.

By: James Cornell

James Cornell — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:56:06 +0000

Brent,
Great follow-up to your “Another backup failure: Carbonite” post. Not sure how I missed it until now. I have been using carbonite on my macbook pro for a couple of months now to backup the usual files (photos, documents, and quickbooks). After reading the comments by the CEO of carbonite and everyone elses input I’m thinking its time to go pickup an Apple TimeCapsule or one of those new Iomega IX2-200.

Quick question though. Are you doing any kind of online / offsite backups or just keeping everything physically in your house? I get a little worried when I think about all the source code, photos and documents I have spread out between my laptop, desktop and Virtual Machines.

By: Looking for Reliability

Looking for Reliability — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:49:03 +0000

I have read through all the comments on both pages about Carbonite and am now wondering are there any other companies that offer similar ease of use and price but are run by someone who understands data protection? I can’t believe a company that deals with backups in any way would not be able to tout, multiple redundancy.
I don’t care if the supposed chances of failure are 1 in 1 or 1 in a googolplex. The technology is there for multi-media, multi-site data replication, they should use it.

By: Carbonite Backup - Review and License Giveaway

Carbonite Backup - Review and License Giveaway — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:46:17 +0000

[...] trusting a service like Carbonite is reliability. Carbonite uses RAID 5 array which is cheap but offers limited redundancy. Another annoying aspect of Carbonite is that is refuses to automatically backup many file-types [...]

By: Rob Boek

Rob Boek — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:12:49 +0000

I admit, I’m not very familiar with Carbonite’s offering, but one of the features other services offer, is the ability to recover prior versions of files. Let’s say I am working on a document and realize that I liked the version I had last week better, I could go to the service and download the file as it appeared last week.

If Carbonite doesn’t offer this feature, they are way behind other offerings. If they do offer this feature, how can they possibly think that the customer’s data is a sufficient backup losing a few hard drives in their RAID array???

By: K. Brian Kelley

K. Brian Kelley — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:52:31 +0000

This is extremely surprising considering you’re talking about a company that’s entire business model is centered around storage for recovery. I can understand RAID 5. We’re talking files. We’re not talking databases. But not replicating data to other facilities. What? If your business model has multiple locations, use ‘em to back each other up.

By: Mark S. Rasmussen

Mark S. Rasmussen — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:47:44 +0000

I cannot see how Carbonite could’ve made the decision to run 1:15 RAID5’s in the first place, even with their laissez faire attitude on backup vs. archiving. The cost of running RAID6 over RAID5 should be minimal, and the security increases by several magnitudes.

Furthermore, it worries me that their CEO seems to be less than positive on the actual storage methods & numbers. I hope it’s just a typo, “an improved RAID that allows for the loss of 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously”, if not, I’d like to get that RAID6 array that’ll handle triple disk failures. It could be that our storage array is seriously underperforming, but there’s no way I can rebuild a failed disk on a RAID5/6 15 disk array in “a few hours”.

Anyways, it’s easy to put blame afterwards, especially if one’s not employed at the company. However, 15 disk RAID5’s are unforgivable, imho.

By: Jerry Hung

Jerry Hung — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:54:04 +0000

I like it, backup != archive, ha ha

They could go RAID6 to allow 2 disk failures if they are really low on budget
RAID 6 (striped disks with dual parity) (less common) can recover from the loss of two disks.

I recently learned about DropBox, free 2GB space that works across multiple OS’, not a bad way to sync/backup stuff either

By: David Stein

David Stein — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:45:17 +0000

Thanks for the explanation Brent. I knew how Raid 5 worked, but never used it with more than 5 drives or so and hadn’t considered the risk as the number of drives increased.

As far as Carbonite goes, I also want to compliment you for being so diplomatic. I’m not sure they deserve to be treated so benignly.