Carbonite.com

Carbonte takes a different approach to online backup. The entire system is set up in such a way that the user barely notices that it’s active. It basicly works by installing a small program that runs in the background, so there’s no interference with the user’s common tasks. This small program keeps scanning the entire hard drive looking for changed or newly created or downloaded files and builds a database including such information. The supported files include almost every kind of files excepting system files and temporary files or files over 4Gb in size. Once it detects that the computer is idle, which means that there aren’t any “active” programs being used by the customer, it encrypts those files two times and compresses them, and then sends them via Internet using an encrypted connection to Carbonite.com’s datacenters where they are stored wth the highest security standards. However if the computer is in use, it will just sit in the background waiting for idle time, so that this small software doesn’t slow down the computer nor use resources that could be needed by other programs.

Every customer has access to a web based application where they can start a restore of a single file (maybe a file that was deleted by accident) or a full restore, which would transfer all files from the original backup to the computer. This kind of services becomes very useful when you suffer a complete hard drive crash or when a computer just dies or is stolen, as your information can be restored back in just a few minutes, restoring all files in an encrypted form and then decrypting them in the local hard drive for increased security.

At the time of this review, the service costs just $54.95 a year per computer without any storage restrictions, which means that it doesn’t matter if your computer has a few gigabytes of files or an entire terabyte, it can be backed up and restored using Carbonite.com.

Carbonite.com also offers a free 15 day trial which you can use to test drive their services, if after the trial period expires you find their service to be useful, you can extend your account to a paid one without having to start a new backup.

Al in all, Carbonite.com is one of the best backup services we could find online, having just a few drawbacks, like that it’s only available for Windows based PCs or Intel based Mac’s running OS 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.4 (Tiger).