Carbonite is dangerous to your file health!!

A couple years ago when I was losing data due to Time Machine failures, I went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store. They didn't have any suggestions for me about Time Machine, but the Genius suggested I try Carbonite.

I did so and for a while I was quite satisfied.

For the last six months and longer, it constantly fails me in not doing backups. Iget things going and after a while I just assume it is going OK as there are no status warnings or error reports. I guess I'm stupid tht way. But when I check its status I find one or the other of these problems. Sometimes I find that it says it cannot connect to my backup or there is something wrong with it. Other times, such as today, when I log into my online account with Carbonite (BTW, I purchased a subscription for it that is good until Sept 2014), it tells me Online Backup is OVERDUE. Last backed up June 13, 2013. Today is June 27, 2013 for those of you who read this later. The backup is 14 days out of date! The status page on System Preferences shows that 42 GB of files are awaiting backup and 132 GB of files are in the backup. When I opened the System Preference pages, it showed Carbonite as IDLE! After I opened my Account in Safari through the button in System Preferences, it now says Backup in Progress.

Why, you may be asking, did I put such an alarmist subject on my post? I have encountered this situation (either one or the other) AT LEAST MONTHLY for the last SIX MONTHS. I have repeatedly contacted Carbonite Support and asked what I can do. THEY HAVE PERSISTENTLY IGNORED MY REQUEST (at least I have received ZERO responses).

If a paid service such as Carbonite does not respond to help request filed through the HELP link on the System Preferences page on my iMac and US Based Support is advertised as part of what I paid for, I find that at least half the time my files are not being backed up. Why should I continue to use it. For the moment mostly because I paid a special rate for 3 years of service.

Being in teh business for a while, this is not my only backup strategy. I also have Time Machine running regularly. While TM has worked at times for me in the past, I have had it collalsally fail when I needed to restore a systm. The worst case was two years ago, when my iMac failed completely. Apple Care replace about everything. The power supply, the video unit, the mother board and a few other things. The iMac doesn't have a lot of parts. I've seen the inside of mine when the repairman was ehre. Finally they replaced the entire computer. However, i then discovered that as I had just moved to LION before the failure, that the TM files from Snow Leopard which constituted most of my backup were not compatible with Lion Migrate Utility and there was no way to migrate from my TM backup to my brand new but empty computer. Apple offered me nothing. I got a new machine but appeared to have lost my data.

What I finally did was after my old computer had rested for a month or so and Apple was bugging me about returning it, I turned in on again and it worked long enough for me to backup my user files from teh internal HD to an external HD which I then could load on my new machine.

My next worst TM tale was in teh first six months after I mvoed to MAC. I had regularly backed up via TM to a Time Capsule attached to my iMac. When I needed to do a major restore, it told me that the backup was corrupt. There appear to be no tools to rescue a corrupt backup. That may be in part the use of Sparse Bundles, I don't know. I have rescued data on an external drive that had some corruption on it by using disk tools that did the job. Under Windows, I even wrote programs to read the disk and write it to new files reading at a low level. But my knowledge of OS X does not go far enough to do this kind of rescue. I ahve even had a data recovery company rescue a disk that was unmountable. That was expensive.

I have found after years of experience that any method that requires me to manually intervene regularly to do the back ups always ceases to get done just before a failure. I need an automated approach.

What do people recomend? How do I make sure the Time Machine continues to work and is restorable. Anyone know how I can get a service like Carbonite to keep working and get the service for which I paid.

From Time to Time, I owuld like to do a periodic full backup for safety to an external disk which I will set aside. What is the best tool for doing that. From now on, when upgrading OS X, I want a full backup so that I don't get in that Snow Leopard to Lion fiasco. We have Mavericks announced for this fall I believe, so I want to get ready for that.

Thanks,

Bruce