There is actually a work around for backing up external drives with Carbonit – you just need to map them through an internal drive. I’ve tried this out and it does work.

I got a free year’s subscription to Carbonite with my LaCie external hard drive, which DOES let me back up external drives. This expires in a few weeks – I’m wondering what is going to happen if I renew it? Will I still be able to back up my external drives I wonder?

I would have paid even more for this “plus” service but I don’t even see it on their site. I won’t use them again.

Firstly the Carbonite email support system seems unreliable when initiated from the Infocenter control panel…I had sent email support requests and an online chat request many times over past days. They say they can see no record of that. The only email they have found of mine is a bitter complaint I sent to their CEO’s email address, directly out of Outlook. Seems to me that clicking on the email support button on the Infocenter doesn’t gurantee your message goes anywhere…but message I sent from Outlook to customersupport@carbonite.com seemed to go through. So I suggest that you use your email program to initiate the email, not their button, and if you don’t get a prompt answer, call their phone support line and insist on getting some free assistance on the spot.

Transfer of the .pst file is apparently a delicate operation, easily upset by connection glitches, and if interrupted the process starts again from the beginning. They recommend recovery of .pst file should be done with PC directly wired to router, not over wireless connection.

Also make sure that power options are set so that sleep or auto shutdown of the PC is cancelled. And turn off auto Windows updates so that there is no risk of PC shutting down and restarting itself when you aren’t around.

The file is sent in parts. My 1 gb .pst file is about 560 parts and in the end it took about 44 hours to restore.

Once you start to restore the .pst file you need to check that it does actually start tranferring…that seemed to be the problem with my numerous first attempts. You can check this in the file carbonite.log.

When the file starts to transfer it creates a temp file in the destination folder which shows as containing 0 kb. This doesn’t necessarily indicate anything useful…you need to look at the file Carbonite.log, which on my Vista laptop is at C:\ProgramData\Carbonite\Carbonite Backup, file name Carbonite.log. Scroll to the bottom of the log and if the restore has started, you should be able to see lines which say something like “@ GetFile: Restored part 1 of 569 of file”…the part number will change as it downloads more parts. (In between each of these progress lines there is a couple of lines of other stuff.)

The log does not update itself once the log is open…ie if you want to see if it has progressed 5 minutes later, close the log and open it again, the log text will have refreshed with more info at bottom of the page, hopefully showing that more parts have been sent.

If it is not showing any sign of starting, cancel the restore and try again.

Once the restore starts, it seems quite fragile. Keep checking the log to make sure it’s still coming. It took me several attempts…on the first attempt I was hit by a short internet outage in my area, so I had to start a fresh restore…5 hours down the drain. On my second attempt I had the temerity to plug a USB memory key into the laptop…that caused a crash…another 7 hours wasted. It seems to not pick up restoring a .pst file from where it left off (as it does with other file and folder restores)…it usually just starts from the beginning again! However on my final successful attempt, I did experience a shutdown after only about 10 of the 560 parts had been transmitted and slightly to my surprise it did manage to pick up again and continue restoring from that point.

The information you get in the Infocentre is not reliable either…eg if you click to “cancel a restore in progress” it doesn’t always seem to respond, no matter how many times you click it….still shows the file as restoring, and the “View file recovery log” still shows a file restore pending. And if you view the carbonite.log file, you usually discover it has ignored your “cancel” request and the restore is still underway! The only way to get the Infocentre to display accurate info sometimes seems to be to restart the PC…then when you view Infocentre again you find out whether or not is has responded to your requests.

Similarly the information from their support desk is not always reliable. At one point, after my PC had been in “recover” mode for 6 days straight, they told me that from their monitoring of my account it seemed my PC was in “backup” mode instead. I double checked and no, I was definitely in recover mode and indeed at that point was restoring files.

When I weigh it all up, Carbonite seems to be OK for backing up most file types but for .pst files and possibly some other types, it’s a waste of time. Waiting nearly two days for a single file to restore and hoping that your PC and connection don’t introduce some minor interruption in all that time is not a practical solution in my opinion. In the future, I’ll be using Carbonite as a back up for minor file losses but I’ll be using a more reliable solution for major backups.

And if .pst files are a especially tricky to restore it’s a shame that they don’t provide any info on .pst problems on their FAQs…would have saved me a lot of time.

I find it hard to believe they seriously expect people to recommend Carbonite to a friend when their support service is non-existent.

That sounds pretty horrible. Unfortunately I don’t have many suggestions for you, after signing up with mozy, I haven’t looked back and don’t know anyone/anything about carbonite these days.

Good luck to you.