Cloudfreeday's Blog

“...I will delete (or edit out) any reference, or link, to a site which I believe exists solely, or largely, for viral or referral purposes.”

This blog has received a number of “comments” which I believe are actually nothing more than a way to refer traffic to the author’s own viral marketing or referral program. This is sometimes known as “astroturfing” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing).

It would seem that a mini-industry has established itself – an industry that is solely based on directing referrals to various online backup providers (and other cloud-based services) and receiving payment for any subsequent sign-up. These sites often purport to offer “independent” or “unbiased” analysis, or comparison, of these cloud-based services.

Such sites can also be used to drown-out any negative comment, or to generate positive buzz around products. It’s an unethical way to do business – unethical for the owners of such sites, and unethical for those who pay for referrals. In the end, it’s unfair to any consumer who parts with their hard earned cash based on comments which have been concocted.

I am happy to allow fair comment from all, however, I will delete (or edit out) any reference, or link, to a site which I believe exists solely, or largely, for viral or referral purposes. Every comment posted to this site will be carefully reviewed for adherence to this policy.

If there are persistent efforts by individuals or groups to bypass this policy then such comments will be marked as spam and further action may be taken if required.

What if you use a particular application, or system, that creates files with an extension that Carbonite staff have deemed isn’t worthy of backup?

Carbonite users... have to worry about another secret list which excludes even more file types! What a ridiculous situation!

Well… be prepared to exchange many, many email messages with Carbonite “support”. Far from a pleasant experience, you’ll find yourself repeating yourself and in the end you’ll probably want to cancel your subscription. Yes, this whole process has left me exasperated.

My issue is this: I use Vista’s BitLocker feature. BitLocker allows you to encrypt your hard drives so if your computer is stolen whoever gets it won’t be able to access your data. One of the ways you can unlock your BitLocker-protected data is via a small (124 bytes) BEK key file which you store on a USB key. You simply insert this at start-up time and “voila” your data is unlocked.

I already keep this key on a number of USB drives just in case I lose one or the USB drive fails for whatever reason. I thought that keeping the file on my hard drive would be a good idea too as Carbonite would back that up offsite. After all, that’s what Carbonite is supposed to do, back up your data to an offsite location.

How wrong I was. Carbonite won’t backup the tiny, tiny BitLocker encryption file. Further, there are no Carbonite options available on right-click of the file to allow me to force backup of that file.

Carbonite tells me that “Carbonite provides you with unlimited backup of all your irreplaceable files of your computer.” Well, if the one and only key that can access the files of my computer isn’t “irreplaceable” I don’t know what is!

The interesting thing is, if you refer back to my post here What should be included in your backup? you will see that the BEK file type is not listed on the excluded file types.

So what now? Not only do Carbonite’s users need to consider the list of excluded file types (which I suspect many users don’t even know about), they also have to worry about another secret list which excludes even more file types! What a ridiculous situation!

Is Carbonite offering users a backup service or is it not? Carbonite needs to allow its users to control what is important and what is not.

(One day soon I’ll detail the arduous exchange I had with Carbonite support about this.)

...Carbonite customer service simply stopped responding...

The answer is probably “Yes”.

However, I’ve been with Carbonite for quite some time and I’d like to allow them an opportunity to address some of the issues I have raised. I’m sure that if someone outside of their general customer service put some genuine effort into this, some proper responses might be forthcoming.

It should be noted that some months back when I had similar issues, Carbonite customer service simply stopped responding (in any way) to my concerns – I then went on holiday and didn’t follow up any further.

Interestingly, it was suggested to me that they were “parking” my correspondence in their issue tracking system – I guess that it could also be said that they were simply ignoring my correspondence.

Let’s see what happens this time around. I am willing to forgive and forget but there has to be some genuine effort on their part to resolve the technical issues.

I’ve started to explore alternatives – the market is looking quite crowded now – but there are some nice ones out there.

Here’s a copy of one of the blank email messages from Carbonite. I’ve redacted my name and reference numbers.

This is quite strange: Today I received two email messages from Carbonite customer service (each with different reference numbers), however, aside from the reference numbers themselves, the email messages were blank!

I’m unsure what Carbonite is trying to tell me. I’ve asked for more information.

Update on Thursday, 8 October 2009 at 20:58

An email from Carbonite tells me that I received the blank emails from their “email archiving program” and that I shouldn’t have received those messages.

I’m now waiting patiently for responses to the substantive issues. Let’s hope we get these things resolved.