Mozy to Carbonite… Oh no you don’t!
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After relative bliss with Mozy the past few months, I finally decided to switch to Carbonite. The Mozy client software is riddled with bugs and the upload throttling logic has plagued the utility of my machine while backups are in progress. To make matters worse, their client software updates have been less than smooth with it frequently being the case I have to uninstall it completely first, reboot and reinstall. Upgrades? I think not.
I recently picked up a Windows Home Server (WHS) to replace my D-Link DNS-323 NAS due to the improvements in network performance and remote access scenario I get. WHS is based on Windows Server 2003 and Mozy consequently assumes that I’m a business/enterprise user and doesn’t let me use their standard account. Their client software has an explicit whitelist of platforms it can install on.
In order to get WHS support, they want me to upgrade to their "Mozy Pro" account. Let’s compare their pricing:
- MozyHome: $4.95 per month, all you can eat storage
- MozyPro: $3.95 per month + $0.50 / GB per month
I have 116 GB currently backed up through Mozy which means that "upgrading" to MozyPro would cost me an additional $57 per month over what I’m paying now! Goodbye Mozy.
Enter: Carbonite. I’ve heard such great things about the service from friends, including Omar’s recent ramblings. I was particularly impressed that the CEO of Carbonite even took time to respond in the comments of Omar’s blog. I love it when companies close the loop with actual end-users.
I signed up for a new Carbonite account which took all of 5 minutes. Easy schmeasy.
As part of this switch from Mozy to Carbonite, I also wanted to run the backup software on my WHS machine, since I could then eliminate the need to even have my desktop PC turned on for backups to occur.
I downloaded their client software and attempted to install it on my Windows Home Server through remote desktop into the administrator’s account. It successfully installed, but when their client service attempted to "register my computer" with the Carbonite cloud service, it failed. It opened IE and navigated to an error page that said:
Carbonite could not connect to the server to complete registration.
It’s possible that a firewall or other security program may be preventing Carbonite from connecting to the Internet.
If you have Norton Internet Security installed, click here for instructions to configure Norton Internet Security to work with Carbonite.
Hmm… Okay, sounds like a firewall issue. I explicitly allowed the Carbonite client exe to bypass the firewall but that unfortunately didn’t resolve the issue. I then turned the firewall off completely as a test, but still no dice.
I searched their online help with no luck and did a general web search for Carbonite on WHS, but no luck there either. I resorted to emailing their customer support to describe my problem and 2 days later they responded with this:
Hello and thanks for contacting customer support:
I apologize but Carbonite doesn’t support the Windows Home Server either, as Carbonite was designed for Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Their OS support matrix on their site isn’t that easy to find, but I did find this after digging around longer than I expected:
The current version of Carbonite is designed for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Carbonite supports both the standard 32-bit and 64-bit versions of both XP and Vista. Carbonite will not support older versions of Windows (Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows ME). Carbonite for the Mac will be available in mid-2008.
There is no mention of explicitly not support Windows Server SKUs and since I was able to install the client without any platform warnings, I assumed that it would work. We all know what they say about when you "assume". Admittedly, I have to shoulder some of the blame for this since I should have explicitly checked that WHS would be supported.
Since their customer support was less than helpful, as a hail mary, I have an email to their VP of Customer Support probing into this further (they gave me his email address as part of the response they sent in case I had more questions). I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it’s an issue that can be readily solved. My last resort is mapping a drive to the shared folders and backing up from my desktop PC.
In the meantime, if anyone has successfully gotten Carbonite working on a Windows Home Server, let me know!
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Related posts:
Have you looked at JungleDisk (http://www.jungledisk.com)? I very much like the model of purchasing the software (once) from a dedicated developer, and renting the hosting/storage space from a separate, reliable vendor. There is a version specifically designed for Windows Home Server as well.
Brad Corob
12 Feb 08 at 7:34 pm
Brad, I looked at Jungle Disk and while it has great features like Block-level updates, it’s the ongoing costs I worry about. Amazon S3 charges $0.15/GB per month + $0.10/GB transfer costs. I have no way to approximate my transfer costs, but going on storage costs alone my costs would be $20 per month, or $240 per year. A big difference from the $4.95/month that Carbonite charges.
Trevin
12 Feb 08 at 11:36 pm
I agree the pricing for your particular situation would be more. However, once I realized that Amazon’s pricing is the closest approximation to wholesale online disk space available, I changed my backup strategy slightly. Rather than rely on retailers who are overselling their capacity (your storage on Carbonite is effectively subsidized by users who store very little – a shaky proposition at best), I split my backups into two groups:
1) Stuff that changes infrequently but that I want to archive for the long term (50 GB of photos, tons of music, etc.) There’s not much sense in me spending days (or weeks) uploading this to an online service. It takes forever and isn’t really cost effective. I take a backup of this stuff about once a month on a hard drive and keep it at work.
2) Small stuff that changes frequently. This is a prime target for online backup – local email, my Money file, etc. It’s economical and convenient to back up daily changes for this small subset of items online.
When choosing a backup strategy, however, I guess you have to decide whether you are optimizing for data safety, convenience, or price.
Brad Corob
13 Feb 08 at 10:25 am
I still think you should go the physical route for your main backup and online for the smaller bits in-between. Much the same idea as Brad. With this week’s outage of Amazon’s A3 I’m more than ever convinced it’s the best route. Its not like there is anything wrong with Amazon’s storage, but more that any online provider will have outages and I really think you need another physical copy somewhere where you can get it.
Phil Holden
16 Feb 08 at 10:59 am
Hi Trevin,
We don’t state that we support WHS because we don’t specifically develop for nor test on WHS right now, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Carbonite won’t work on your WHS box. In fact, a number of our customers -do- run Carbonite on WHS and W2003. What we typically recommend is that you install a trial, back up some files, and then restore some files to make sure that your Windows Server configuration will get along with Carbonite. (Sometimes it won’t – it really depends on your configuration.)
At any rate, you should still be able to install properly so that you can determine whether Carbonite will get along with your configuration. I’d like to have someone work with you directly. Would you mind sending another note to customersupport@carbonite.com (this time with ATTN: Len in the subject line) and include your phone contact info and the best time to call?
We are looking at supporting WHS directly in a future release, but I don’t have any details or a timeline yet for that support.
Sincerely,
Len Pallazola
Manager, Customer Service Systems
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com
Len - Carbonite
18 Feb 08 at 7:44 am
I am running server 2003 and was able to successfuly install but when trying to restore after a system crash I had problems with newer versions installing and have over 27,000 files that won’t restore (everything on “d”)
I have had numerous generic support requests sent and got the standard 3 day turn around time and then a generic “try this” (uninstall – reinstall) and then three days…. It’s been over three weeks since my crash and I don’t have any data restored.
I have written customer support asking for my money back and recieved the same set of generic emails.
Backup. Simple.
Restore. Impossible when it’s needed
SteveWilson
10 Aug 08 at 7:10 am
Steve,
I’d like to look into your issue for you. Please send me a note at customersupport@carbonite.com with ATTN:Len in the subject line and mention this Blog so that I can work with you directly.
Sincerely,
Len Pallazola
Manager, Customer Service Systems
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com
Len - Carbonite
11 Aug 08 at 7:27 am
I’m successfully running Carbonite on Windows Server 2008 Standard. I have yet to see any indication of incompatibility. Restores work very well. My complaint of the software thus far is that it does not function as a service at boot–I have to log in for it to run. Thus, if my server reboots after a power failure, my backups are on hold until I can log in.
Brian Stanfill
11 Sep 08 at 5:58 pm
Brian: There are multiple applications out there that will allow you to make any exe a process, which should work in your case. I know I’ve seen some freeware apps in the past, but didn’t have time to look for them again. In my quick search, I found this paid app that might help you:
http://www.application-as-service.com/
Trevin
13 Sep 08 at 4:44 pm
Trevin,
I am also a successful Carbonite user on W2003 Small Biz Server.
Have you heard back from the tech support gurus? I see from their comments above that they are proactive in helping, while they work on officially making it work on WHS.
I’m sure you’ve tried all the obvious things like turning off the firewall, antivirus, etc., to see if that will fix it.
Thanks for blazing the trail for us!
John
John
28 Sep 08 at 9:58 am
I’ve tried using Carbonite on WHS and the limitation seems to be that you cannot select any files or directories that are accessed through a “share”.
For example, any file on the Desktop shows a “Carbonite” option when you right-click on it. Go to the “Shared Folders” icon and right-click on Videos, Music, Documents, or Photos, and not Carbonite option appears. Decend into a sub-folder in one of the shares, and there is no Carbonite context menu.
Am I missing something, or if WHS is configured to combined multiple drives into a virtual disk, any share that is mounted on that disk seems unavailable to Carbonite.
I tried emailing customer support about this, but as expected did not get a response. The online-chat session did not respond either.
Tony
8 Oct 08 at 10:12 pm
I chatted with Carbonite customer service today. The short answer is that Carbonite only supports internal hard drives. External drives, even USB, are not supported.
Seems like a silly limitation, but as a result it’s not for me.
Tony
9 Oct 08 at 10:43 pm
I have been chatting with carbonite support for months on this topic and in the end both I and the carbonite support person agreed that Carbonite was not the solution for me:
Carbonite will install and run on WHS and supports internal drives only so long as you only have one drive.
It does not support the spanning or duplication – which pretty much means its useless for most.
At one point, Carbonite were thinking of supporting a version that did work with external drives. This could solve the issue slightly as we could backup to external nighly and carbonite could do the rest. This was unfortunatly pulled i believe.
Which is a shame as Carbonite is a nice product, better than Mozy and dont even get me going about KeepVault.
Being a software engineer i also volunteered to modify carbonite so it would work with WHS, however as you can probalby guess that request was turned down.
Steve Mortimer
16 Nov 08 at 2:09 am
you should try elephantdrive!
If you have questions .. deharris (at) web (dot) de
Harri
16 Nov 08 at 4:21 am
I’ve had Carbonite now for a couple of years. For most of that time…smooth as silk.
Two major problems have popped up lately though:
1. Folder and file dots not working properly after an 10/08 upgrade of software. Lots of back and forth (slow response) with support. Bottom line, no solution. Not a killer but I rely on those dots on Windows Explorer.
2. CarboniteService.exe is all of a sudden using 50% of my CPU consistently. Even in low priority mode. This is a killer. I created a support request but don’t expect a satisfying or prompt response based on previous experience. This is a killer. I’ll probably look to Mozy.
Gary
1 Jan 09 at 8:47 am
I would recommend LogMeIn Backup. It does just what you need by using the LogMeIn application to backup ALL your drives to another machine either in the subnet or across the country. Its really just a SaaS backup solution but it works very well.
Jason
4 Feb 09 at 5:34 pm
I had the same problem as Trevin Chow with Windows Server 2003. I made the mistake of purchasing carbonite, before trying out the demo. I tried the demo on my windows xp, and it worked fine, so I assumed the same would go for windows server 2003! HaHaHa I know that sounds stupid, but sometimes life is about making stupid mistakes. Anyways I contacted customer support and did offer me a full refund for the carbonite program installed on my W.S.2003.
I would not reccomend carbonite for someone trying to install it on a server. My server froze and did a lot of weird stuff, even when I disabled the program from running on the background. I left the program running for 13 hours, and it only backed up 134 mega bytes. I was not satisfied with this sw’s performance on W.S. 2003. Do not get me wrong though, it works great in windows XP, just as they advertise it! So if they do not mention your O.S. then do not purchase this program without testing the demo!
Israel
2 Mar 09 at 12:39 pm
I installed Carbonite on WHS server and ran for the 30 day trial period. When it shut down automatically after 30 days, so did the file extender system. I multiple drives with duplexing on. Everything would hang trying to get to the other drive. I sat and clicked ‘retry’ to keep it going. It tooks days to get all the files safely off of WHS. But I got em. I didn’t notice any issues while it was ruuning.
Kent
1 Apr 09 at 6:48 pm
By default WHS blocks all sites in IE for security purposes. Try Going into the internet explorer options and adding *.* to the trusted sites. this will make your computer less secure (supposedly, im not a security guy) but will allow access to all sites.
Steve Mitchell
26 Apr 09 at 1:45 pm
I don’t know if there has been software changes but I am running windows home server with carbonite installed with no issues.
I was unable to back up from the shares folder on the desktop so I had to open up explorer and right click the backups from the D drive. The system is running with 4 internal drives that are merged): 3 1 terabytes and a 512gb that came with it.
I have one external USB drive that is not merged with these drives (kept as an incoming file drive before sorting).
I don’t know if my use of the D drive rather than the shares is dangerous in some manner to the imaging process but everything seems to be working fine for me.
Michael D
5 May 09 at 12:30 pm
I’m also testing carbonite on WHS machine. Cannot backup from D:\Shares – I get a “file pending backup when accesible due to permissions” notice… then nothing. The service runs as “system” account and has full access over the directories. I can however backup the files from the C:\fs\x\DE\Shares\ directory but I think this very messy andwill be unable to restore properly in the event of a clean reinstall because the \fs\x\ volume may be mounted as \fs\y or some other letter/path after a full reinstall.
any ideas?
Benjamin
14 Jun 09 at 10:43 am