Digital Home Thoughts: Time To Run Screaming From Carbonite: They Won't Back Up Your Videos

"When I started my Carbonite subscription nearly two years ago, at least one FAQ on Carbonite's website said that free-trial users would not get automatic back-ups of video files but that paid subscribers would get automatic back-ups of video files. This wording persisted all the way through my extending my Carbonite subscription on December 28, 2008, for another two years beyond the end of the expiring subscription. After I paid Carbonite another $89.95 for the subscription renewal, I discovered to my shock that MANY of my hundreds of video files had NOT been backed up, including video files dating back to 1999!"

I wrote an article back in August 2008 where I talked about why I switched from Carbonite to Mozy [Affiliate] for online backup purposes. My main reason for leaving Carbonite was that their service would not back up my EXE files and ISO files. Read my article for more details. What shocked me today was reading the blog post I quoted above where Kirk Mahoney confirms that Carbonite will not back up any video files unless, I think, those video files are in a folder with nothing else and you tell Carbonite to back up my folder. My read on this is that if you have video files mixed in with your photos - which most people would do, vacation photos and videos - Carbonite will back up the photos but ignore the videos.

This is, in a word, appalling. It was bad enough that Carbonite didn't consider my EXE files worthy of backing up, but for them to treat user video the same way is completely ridiculous. Most people will have more photos than video, but with HD video cameras getting less and less expensive, we're going to see a boom in HD content creation. If Carbonite doesn't want to back up video files, that's fine - but I'll be slowly moving every friend and relative off Carbonite and onto Mozy as the subscription expires. I've kept everyone on Carbonite because it has a more user-friendly software user interface, but I'm sure that they all care more about having all their files backed up than they do about having easy to use software - once I configure the backups for them, it's not like they have to do anything.

Carbonite as a company should be ashamed of themselves for not treating all user data, videos included, as being equally important.