My Hard Drive Crash Experience: Why I Am Ditching Carbonite For Dropbox

[David Baxter PhD]

My Hard Drive Crash Experience ? Why I Am Ditching Carbonite For Dropbox
by Jonathan Volk
Sept. 1, 2011

After I went and got a nice new solid state 256gb drive (soo excited to have a solid state finally), I reinstalled windows 7 and went about trying to recover all my data.

First thing was Dropbox. Click, click. Installed and recovering all my data. I love it. So stinkin' easy.

Next is Carbonite. I install their software, and being the recovery process?

Recovering files with carbonite is like pulling teeth

• Anytime a file was remotely big (300mb+) Carbonite would completely stall. The entire restore process would be haulted.
• Anytime a folder had a lot of files in it, carbonite would completely stall. My music folder is not even 25% downloaded and it has stalled like 15 times.
• Anytime Carbonite stalls, you must cancel the entire transfer and restart the transfer.
• I tried downloading the bigger files using their web interface thinking that it might be a program issue. No luck, their web login sessions are so short that you get logged out before you can download a 100+ mb file.

All in all, the entire Carbonite backup system is awesome? until you actually need to restore any files. Seeing as I was paying $50 per month for Carbonite pro, you?d think it would be so much better but it wasn?t.

Leaving Carbonite For Dropbox
After having all those issues, I decided to completely switch from Carbonite to Dropbox Pro. I get 100 gigs of space for less than $20 bucks per month, over 50% less than I was paying.

The only tricky part will be putting the files I normally used Carbonite to backup, into my dropbox. Completely worth it in my opinion though.

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