For a little over a year now I’ve subscribed to Carbonite’s online back-up service to back up my main Mac (in addition to a local Time Machine back-up and occasional cloning as well). Overall, I haven’t had any real problems with the service and fortunately have not had to use it much at all since I’ve suffered no hard drive failures, natural disasters, or other issues. However, I’m canceling that subscription and have asked them for a pro-rated refund and here’s why.
Apple’s latest version of Mac OS X, Lion, was released on July 20. I upgraded my main Mac to Lion that night and my MacBook Air the next day. On July 22 I received the following email from Carbonite:
I was very upset to hear this for a few reasons:
- Carbonite’s core service is to offer an online back-up of your data in case something catastrophic happens to your computer. The inability of its service to work with Lion negated its only function for me.
- This is a paid service. The money I pay them should go, in part, to ensure that their service is up and running at all times and that it is updated as needed to adequately support all paying customers. Clearly, this wasn’t happening quickly enough at Carbonite for some reason.
- Apple released its first developer preview of Lion in February 2011. I find it inexcusable that a company that offers a service that is intended to be critical in case of a catastrophic event at your home (a fire, earthquake or just plain hard drive failure) wasn’t ready in time for Lion’s release. When I tweeted about Carbonite’s failure here, I got responses from other online back-up services Backblaze, Crashplan, and Dolly Drive, letting me know that their services were 100% compatible with Lion from day one.
- Carbonite could not give a solid ETA of when their service would be compatible with Lion. It would have been one thing if the message had been “Oh, we’re just working on a few more things that cropped up unexpectedly and it will take just one more week.” However, no firm ETA tells me that you didn’t bother to scope out the work needed as soon as you could get your hands on the first build of Lion in February and, at the very least, you have the worst project management skills ever.
Admittedly, it’s more and more rare that I find companies that put Mac support on the backburner compared to Windows these days. I know that there are fewer Mac users out there compared to Windows-based PC users but the Mac share of the market is growing every day. Also, once you’ve made the decision to support Macs or any other platform, do it right, for God’s sake. Anything less is telling your customers that you don’t care about them and that their money is somehow worth less than those of other customers.
So, I’m switching to another service as soon. I’m going to trial Backblaze first, do a little more research, and go from there. I’ll post about which service I end up going with once I’ve made my final decision.
(Yes, this is a first-world problem and results in no physical harm to me or mine but I strongly believe in voting with my dollars to tell businesses what I like and don’t like and this is definitely a case where it’s important to me to do so.)
I’m ditching carbonite too. They have a “no refund” policy and I simply don’t feel like fighting for my $50. I’ll just eat it and go with backblaze or crashplan – both of who proudly supported Lion on day one. And a “free month” of carbonite??? Please, I got a free month for signing up my buddy. That’s will be gone in 9 days, so technically “you get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!”
Carbontie has never really had love for the Mac. Their windows software has had more features for over 2 years. But carbonite has a great iphone app and was a rock solid service.
It’s a shame because I really like(d) carbonite. Coming up on 1 month now and no updates. Even if we do have an update soon, I’m leaving carbonite. To the best of my immediate knowledge, every single open source and 3rd party app I have was either lion compatible on day 1 or it was actively announced they had problems and were working on it. Good grief – even the Slingbox app works in lion and that’s a miracle in itself!
Cam,
You should ask Carbonite for a refund – I just received my pro-rated refund from them so it is possible. I clearly stated in my request that it was due to the lack of Lion compatibility and they did not push back and cite their no refund policy. I think it’s definitely worth the request so you can get some of your money back to put toward a new back-up service that is Lion compatible.
-Marianne
Update:
Cancelled and refunded. For anyone reading, the refund process was smooth but laborious. Anyone interested, before calling, login to your carbonite account and have the last 4 digits of your credit card ready. They’ll work hard to sell you on the free month thing and that a patch is “just around the corner”. Persist nicely, praise their product with the exception of the Lion issue, and you finally get a prorated refund. Takes about 2 weeks to process. Also ask for your ticket # incase you never get an email confirming you are getting a refund.
Thanks Marianne! Moved to crashplan. Seems okay. More features than carbonite’s GUI.
I couldn’t agree more. Frankly Carbonite is a crappy service. The daemon on the MAC is an absolute resource HOG taking upwards of 70-95% at any given time with infrequent dips down to 35-40%. Their upgrade process doesn’t work. I have tried repeatedly to upgrade from 1.1.8 to 1.1.9 and the version remains at .8. I tried going online to chat today. Joined a queue of 16. 30 minutes later I was down to #1 in the queue. A minute later the queue changed to No one is available to help you. This in the middle of their hours on a Saturday!!
Asside from their price they really are not worth it. With this kind of service, I wonder if my data would ever make it back to ME in the event of a failure – which I thankfully have not needed to test. I will be canceling as soon as I can find a suitable replacement for offsite backup. Like the original poster, I too use Timecapsule and have added Carbonite to protect against catastrophic event or theft.