Product ReviewsOffice software
Carbonite has been around for Windows for a while, but it's a newcomer to the Mac. Unlike some other services that charge according to how much data you upload, Carbonite charges an annual subscription, with no limit on disk space. It runs in the background when your Mac is idle and by default backs up everything with the exception of system files, applications, video and files over 4GB in size. You can, however, tell it to back up anything you like by switching off the automatic backup setting and choosing files manually. Once the initial backup, which can take several hours or even days depending on how much data you have, has been completed Carbonite only saves files which are new or have changed. You configure Carbonite using its System Preferences pane, which
It's very easy to see, in Carbonite's Preferences pane, which files have been backed up, which are scheduled to be backed up and which will never be backed up. And restoring files and folders is simply a matter of clicking the Restore tab in the Preferences pane and navigating, Finder style, to the folder or file that you want. In our tests, it took Carbonite a couple of days to back up 32GB of data. During that time, we noticed no difference in Internet connection speeds, either upstream or downstream, and there was no perceptible performance hit on our Mac. We didn't notice incremental backups at all. Should you want to preserve bandwidth, however, you can lower the priority of the Carbonite backup. This will mean that each backup cycle takes longer, but won't hog so much of your Internet connection. Carbonite is easy to use and good value. However, using a Preferences pane is a little restrictive, particularly when it comes to navigating folders. The Windows version uses a virtual disk image on the Desktop, and we would like to see the same on the Mac. By Kenny Hemphill
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