Carbonite Takes Over My Processor!

Thanks everybody. Carbonite seems like a waste of time if the backup restore is worthless. I'm going to go back to Time Machine and stash that HD at work until I find an online solution. I'm not generating a ton of files every day, but the audio and photos I have are irreplaceable. Periodic backups will work okay.

Looking at Arq -- has anyone tried it?

I have been using CrashPlan for several years now. I have had three dead hard drives (imac - twice and a macbook pro) and CrashPlan recovery has been seamless. (You do need to make sure your settings are correct if you have multiple users - but it's not complicated and really works beautifully.) I have used both backup to another computer and to CrashPlan central. In addition, you can backup an external hard drive that is not continually attached to your computer. (ie my music collection that I am slowly backing up over time). It is much easier to control what you are backing up and when you are backing up (you can set it to do backups at night if you want). And you can manually tell it to back something up immediately (ie that one last file before you take the computer to the Apple Store for repairs).

I have been running Carbonite for about a year now on a 2007 iMac. I was running Lion at the start and now Mountain Lion. While still running Lion, I was able to reinstall everything without a problem after my hard drive slowly died earlier this year and was replaced by a new one.

I just noticed this morning while examining Activity Monitor that CarboniteDaemon continually was taking up anywhere from 65% - 120% of the CPU. After doing some quick research, I found this helpful post on another site:

"The high CPU usage problem stems from trying to backup running applications. The solution is to go to the Carbonite pane in System Preferences, select Backup and make sure that any folder that might contain a running app ("Applications", "devtools", etc.) is set to "Will not be backed up" (indicated with a red dot) next to the folder or file."

I followed that advice and it wasn't long until the CarboniteDaemon was back down to 0.3% as it should be. I hope this advice helps others as much as it did me.

Phil,

I am having these same issues of CPU utilization and hogging of resources from Carbonite. Now that you have been using Arq for a while, what do you think? Do you still like it?

Thanks,
James

You stated; "The idea that Mac users basically can't backup any application is pretty bad."

Which is not what I said. I said that in my tests Carbonite was not able to restore in a usable fashion the libraries for Apple products. For instance, when I attempted to restore the library for Aperture, Carbonite was able to recover the photos but most of the other information; such as Place, Face, metadata and edits were either missing or unusable. In addition, I attempted to restore the iTunes library and the restored library worked equally as poorly.

I strongly suggest that before committing to any online backup system, including BackBlaze, you attempt to restore libraries for any applications you use to be sure that they are completely usable after recovery.

Allan

Thank you nudolfan, you have just made Carbonite work for me, pretty much for the the first time.

Solution: Set Carbonite to Automatically Manage Backup AND THEN SWITCH TO MANUAL, AND DE-SELECT APPLICATIONS FOLDER..

This is the first time in months that my MacPro hasn't felt super-laggy...

Same problem... Using 75% - 107% of CPU. I just installed a brand new hard drive and checked it for errors. All clear there.

I simply went up and clicked Back up is: PAUSED on Carbonite Settings. Literally, seconds later, my computer is quiet for the first time since I installed the software. Thank God!

I like that in 24 hours it will start up again and check for backups. I'll simply click PAUSE again.

This isn't ideal for something that should be automatic, however, like the rest of you I paid for a year. It took 18 days to back up my 166 GB of data. Wished I would've known...

CrashPlan offers a free year for people switching from Carbonite. It's a much better backup system for Macs than Carbonite. I have used both and CrashPlan is so much better.

I would like to add that Carbonite has since returned to its system hogging ways - and support emails go unanswered. In desperation, I have disabled it.

I am looking for alternatives as it has never even finished backing my Mac up - and it's slowed everything down since it was installed.

Conclusion: Don't get Carbonite, it's rubbish.

Carbonite and support are a problem, I transferred my 3 yr 'licence' to my IBM laptop and started using Haystack's Arq for my iMac. No problem and cheap to run.

The Haystack website has a good summary of some of the competition.

Is it able to restore a usable copy of Apple libraries, such as iPhoto or Aperture libraries, which Carbonite can't do?

A untest backup is worthless.

Allan

Allan

What you say is a/the most important thing about backup software. You don't have to take my word for it, Arq have tested this aspect as shown on -

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/arq-backup-bouncer-test.txt

(declared interest: I only use Arq and have no other connection with Haystack)

Have you ever restored anything?

Allan

I have not restored whole libraries, only single files.