There are several good things about Carbonite that are similar to Mozy. They offer unlimited backup, use 448-bit Blowfish encryption on all data that is transferred and they are reasonably priced. Unfortunately Carbonite fell short on a few other details that I thought were important.

First there are several file types that Carbonite does not automatically backup. Primarily video files. This was important to me. I have several GB of home movies that I want to make sure are safe and Carbonite did not want to back them up. I also have several personal projects that are executable files that I wanted to backup. Carbonite refused to select them by default, even though I had selected the folders they were in. This type of file exclusion was not acceptable. Using Mozy I was able to select the folder to backup and all the files in the folder were selected regardless of the file type.

Backing up your files is one thing, but when disaster strikes you need to restore those files. The restoration process for Carbonite is the major reason I decided to go with Mozy. Carbonite only offers restores through their desktop client. What happens if I can’t install the client on my new computer, for example when a new version of Windows is released and Carbonite does not support it yet? The amount of data I was expecting to initially backup was already over 100gb. Downloading that amount of data can take an extremely long time. Mozy won simply because they offered more ways for me to get my data back. With Mozy you have choices to do a Web restore, a client restore or order a restore on DVD. Unofficially I have also seen tweets that Mozy will send you an external hard drive restore in place of DVD’s. These restore options pushed Mozy ahead of Carbonite when I was deciding what online backup service to go with.

I think Mozy is the best online backup service, but whether you choose Carbonite or Mozy the most important thing is you need to backup your files. Do not leave it to chance. Subscribe and start backing up today.