our review (continued)
Then they started to change to green as each file and folder was backed up. It was too easy. I really liked the instant feedback with the yellow & green dots on each file and folder. That feature helped me find a few empty folders that I wasn’t aware of. The default backup does not include programs, system files, temporary files, videos, or individual files greater than 4GB. You can, however, manually add any of these to your Carbonite backup.
I only backed up 270 MBs, but it took less than an hour. I have a typical DSL home network (upstream rate: 916 Kbps) and I didn’t notice any impact to my computer as I worked on other things. The Carbonite InfoCenter is initiated by double clicking on the Carbonite tray icon. It is a simple interface that is easy to navigate. The files that have been backed up are represented as a virtual drive on your computer and this virtual drive is used to browse which folders and files you want to restore. I chose to restore my complete “Documents” folder (about 270 MBs) and directed the restore process to copy the “Documents” folder to a “Temp” folder. It took about 40 minutes. There were 5 files that it couldn’t restore and after taking a look at them it seemed OK. Three of the files were lock files used by Open Office, one was a text file that I had deleted and the last one was a .bak file that was part of a TurboTax file that was probably deleted as well. Unfortunately, once the errors were detected Carbonite seemed to go into a tailspin and then every time that I clicked on the tray icon it came up with a message about errors and retrying. It also added my restored files into it’s backup set even though I just restored them as a test into a temp directory. It worked, but I’m not impressed with the way that Carbonite handled the errors. I was finally able to clear the error messages by removing the files that I had restored to the temp folder.
Overall, Carbonite is easy to install, easy to configure and it works.