By the way, courier service is only available at their highest price tier. Both times, restoring data was pitifully slow and I noticed it is not making use of my fast internet connection for a major restore. I have been through two drive failures and had to restore. And I am not confident that everything is in this backup that I need. It will literally take a month to restore all my data on one drive at this rate. The only option was to just continue to restore what I didn't want restored. When restoring, I actually tried to stop the process by hitting the stop button and it just sits there and doesn't know what to do.
It randomly decides not to backup and you have to fiddle with it to get it moving again. What kind of bugs? Failure to backup files. The price has also crept up and the feature list continues to move to a higher price tier.
Now, all these years later, the product is full of bugs and has not kept up with the times. When I first started using carbonite years ago, it was solid and had a lot of great options for the price.
Let me preface this by saying I have been a software developer for over 22 years and I know a thing or two about good software. I learned the hard way that this company gives a false sense of security, and you will eventually suffer a lot if you fully rely on them. Overall, I advise to stay away from this company and look for alternatives. Also, it doesn't backup files over certain size for lower-tier plans, but of course this is well hidden in the fine print (because of that I lost a childhood video recorded from an old VHS tape). I am a programmer, and I lost a lot of work just because Carbonite decided it wouldn't back it up. That includes executables and various system files. How "great" is that? Also, I learned the hard way that many files are by default excluded from backups even if the entire folder is set to be backed up. I guess it will take me entire summer to restore my files, not to mention that backup of new changes is put on pause during this period. Update: after 12 days I am only up to 15% with computer running almost 24/7. But if you don't reside in USA, you are out of luck even if you will to pay because they only offer this to customers located in USA. I guess that's how they really make money. Because when you call and complain, they offer you to ship your files on a hard drive for $99.99, not including shipping (remember to return it within 3 weeks, or they charge you a big fine). Even if you have 200 Mbps internet connection, the speed between you and Carbonite servers can be as low as 1 Mbps (in my case, 1.3 Mbps).
I googled it and apparently there are a lot of complaints about the speed, it can be months (!) to download your backup if it is big enough.
But when I started the restore, the speed is so slow that it will now take weeks to restore my 724 GB of data. I was their customer for a 5 years and today it finally happened: my hard drive crashed beyond recovery. It seems all good until you actually need to restore. I wish I could give them less than 1 star. So, BEWARE-don't even think about using Carbonite! I don't know what happened to them, but don't trust them for your data backup, and certainly don't give them any money!! They never did tell me what the "small issue" was, or why I couldn't access my data, nor did they get back to me. Also no, I could not speak to a supervisor. So I waited the 60 minutes and spoke to a snippy representative who said basically, too bad, and no, they would not refund my money when I said I felt that would be fair. Once I requested a callback, but when the callback came, I pressed 1 to tell them I was there, but the system could process that, and eventually the phone call ended. After six days, SIX DAYS?!, I got an email saying there was "a small issue within the backup database that our engineers are looking into." Not small to me! I called several times, but there was always a 60 minute wait to speak to a representative. However, two weeks ago I was out of town and needed to access some files. I've used Carbonite for years and had relative success with accessing my data when I was away from my computer.