Review Time
I've used Carbonite for years, both on my own systems as well as on customer systems. For years, the product was top notch, and customer support was excellent.
That has all changed in the past six months. The product is now failing to complete backups on the five customer systems I've installed it on, and customer service has gone down the drain, they have no way to fix the problems.
To show how bad their support team has gotten, after spending two hours on the phone with their overseas tier 1 team, they finally escalated my call to the stateside tier 2 team. The tier 2 rep, in sharing my screen, showing a folder (and subfolders) that were not backup it, pointed out in folder "2026", there was a subfolder named "2026". She said that was not supported in Windows! Their tier 2 team wasn't even familia with UNC file naming conventions - that are supported by Windows!
I've used Carbonite for years, both on my own systems as well as on customer systems. For years, the product was top notch, and customer support was excellent.That has all changed in the past six months. The product is now failing to complete backups on the five customer systems I've installed it on, and customer service has gone down the drain, they have no way to fix the problems.To show how bad their support team has gotten, after spending two hours on the phone with their overseas tier 1 team, they finally escalated my call to the stateside tier 2 team. The tier 2 rep, in sharing my screen, showing a folder (and subfolders) that were not backup it, pointed out in folder "2026", there was a subfolder named "2026". She said that was not supported in Windows! Their tier 2 team wasn't even familia with UNC file naming conventions - that are supported by Windows!
The worst company and their customer support is beyond awful. I had purchased a one yr subscriptionAnd it appears to have stopped working after the IOS 26 update on my laptop. I tried to get this fixed by online as well as in person call. I did not feel comfortable of giving them remote access to my computer and asked to cancel the subscriptionAnd they refuse to provide any refund as they said it was after 30 days. The absolute worst experienceI have ever had with a company that appears to be a scam in all areas. Beware if you are even looking too use this service it will be a mistake!
I needed Carbonite reinstalled on a new computer. I reached out to the company, and in a short while, a competent, efficient, polite technician accomplished the task. It took her 30 minutes. Imagine this--a real, live human, knowledgeable and skilled, addressed my problem and resolved all issues. In this day, that is a miracle and deserving of 5 STARS. PS: Twice in the many years that I have been a subscriber, I had to reinstall all files, and the program came to the rescue and worked perfectly.
The online support function feels like it was written by a two year old. It has endless options all of which lead to dead ends. It is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. There is no workflow built around a failed request, just the ether. Lord knows how it makes any money!!
After almost 10 years as a loyal customer, Carbonite failed me when I needed them most. I am attempting a 1.5TB restore on a state-of-the-art 2026 Mac Mini and a 70Mbps BT line. On four consecutive support calls, Carbonite staff stated the low download speeds are on my side i.e my hardware, my ISP, and Apple for my 150KB/s download speeds.Only after I proved the bottleneck was on their end did they finally admit they intentionally throttle restores to 100-150KB/s. At this rate, my data recovery will take over 4 months. They also refused to ship a recovery drive to a US address to help an international customer. This isn't a backup service; it's a data hostage situation. You have lost a long standing customer through dishonesty and technical inadequacy.
I have had Carbonite for years. For the first time I am restoring my backup. It is downloading at 3.5 Mbps. My ISP supports 300 to 500 Mbps. Customer support will not admit they are throttling the download speed. I understand them not wanting people to use as a file transfer service, but this is way too slow.
I've had carbonite for years - don't need it anymore because we have Microsoft Sharepoint. The cancellation policy is awful. I send the request to cancel from within the site. It took several emails to get them the information - just another company trying to make it so hard to cancel that you give up. I'm sure I'm not alone - might be grounds for a Planet Fitness like class action lawsuit.
I've been with Carbonite for years and have recommended them unstintingly. Until now. Their customer service has gone down and down in quality and accessibility over the years while the price has of course increased. Today I'm leaving them because I was unable to access my backup (error code 404) and so I used their 'live chat' to ask someone to call me. I waited well over an hour for someone to call, had to chase, and the net result is they tell me I need to spend over $200 to buy some kind of software to clean viruses from my computer as they assured me this is the reason I can't access Carbonite. I have Norton Utilities which surely is doing the job and apart from Carbonite not working everything else on my computer appears to be fine. I told their salesman that I wouldn't be buying the recommended software and will not be renewing Carbonite under any circumstances. How sad that such a previously great company with a great product has come down to this. I can no longer recommend this company at all, appalling trying to get me to spend yet more money when I'm pretty sure there's no reason for it other than to line THEIR pockets or the pockets of an associate company. Bye Carbonite.EDIT: Despite having paid a month ago for a further year, I appear now to have been shut out of customer support, my own Carbonite account, live chat and any other way to contact them. Perhaps because I asked about a refund on the remaining portion of the subscription for the year. BUYER BEWARE!!!!
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