Carbonite Reviews 3,085

How can you have confidence in a technology like this when their system constantly rejects any submitted "case" to their customer service department with a pop up window apologizing for the inconvenience on their site's technical error? Also cannot change the payment type. Their system only sits there and buffers. Not the same company I signed up with years ago. Time for a fresh coat of paint guys and some dusting above the doors.

I wish you would send your tech tips and account status from a different address than your advertisements.

I was unaware that I was renting a backup hard drive. Was not explained on the website and they took my money before revealing any of the information that I was supposed to return it with in 21 days. I tried to ask for an extension. Waive the fee and there is no flexibility at all to my situation. I do not have a computer right now to download the information in enough time to return it. Carbonate is Not for the customer. Only wants money. Don’t care about the people that are supporting their business.

I have been paying for this service for over ten years. My computer died and they had zero pictures or documents saved (empty folders!). (Despite me having seen the green dot that indicated they were backed up). It’s a scam of a company. Do not recommend!

They claim to have the best support but its basically nonexistent. Tried to cancel my subscription after it auto charged. I just wanted a refund for the 360 days I wouldn't have it. There is NO way to reach support. Its a joke. I would like to confirm that auto payment is turned off but can't even do that. Find a more reputable company that actually has customer support.

I not longer need this as I retired this year and thought I had unsubscribed from auto renewal. Tried to call the same day they had charged credit card and could not get any help at all. Then I find out there is no refund even if its been one day. Customer service? A scam on the elderly.

I learned the reason my computer suddenly was out of space and unusable this weekend was because of a glitch caused by Carbonite in updating its program. Initially I had no idea what was wrong and had to hire a specialist to figure it out. He charged (fairly) more than the cost of my annual Carbonite subscription to discover that it was Carbonite that caused the problem and then fix it.
I told Carbonite customer service about this problem, they admit their update caused it, but they refuse to provide anything to compensate me for the lost computer usage and the cost of a specialist to fix it — not even a complimentary renewal.
So I’m very disappointed with Carbonite. I thought it was supposed to protect our systems — not crash them.

Carbonite regularly stops backing up and you won't know that it happened. For any issues, the support just walks you through reinstalling from scratch. Upgrading from version 1 to version 2 was a major hassle and took aver a week.
Carbonite is a pice of junk. Avoid it. Don't rely on it to actually back up aything safely on your Mac.

used to be great.now stinks.screwed up mt computer.willcnever use again.will cancel

I write my original review in June 2024. It's now Jan 2025, and Trustpilot won't let me change the date of my experience to today's date, even though I'm writing about what happened today. In any case, Carbonite has been terrible for a long time and is still terrible.

I used to really like Carbonite (I've used them for many years), but now I'm not happy. Every time - EVERY TIME - I try to download a backed-up file, I get an error message telling me to try later. EVERY TIME!!!

I need my files now, not "later".

Also, I constantly get messages that my backup is out of date, apparently because the software quietly stopped working for a week or two.

And they want me to pay yet more money for more storage space, after I've already paid them hundreds of dollars.

Their website is excruciatingly slow, so trying to solve problems there is a slo-mo nightmare. They recommend reinstalling the software, but then make it impossible to do (hint: clicking on the link that says reinstall is not the correct way to do it).

I will not renew my subscription. There are many other cloud storage options with lower prices and better customer service.

Losing data is a stressful thing. Carbonite makes it worse, not better. Yes, it backs-up painlessly in the background but, when restoring that data:
a) I didn't see a download rate above 1.5 Mbps, despite being on a fast connection;
b) The software soon showed "100 %" complete, even though the process could only have been no more than 20 % done;
c) After six days, the transfer rate dropped to an average of 108 kbps;
d) Having restarted my PC, the restore stalled and wouldn't restart;
e) The 'Search and restore' function didn't find any recently deleted files;
f) When using the web interface, it is possible to browse to a backed-up folder but clicking the 'back' icon goes right back to the root level - very annoying;
g) Hard-drive delivery is available only in the US.
The time you really need a backup system to work is when you have lost data - that is not the time to find out the above problems.

Customer service only available US hours don't recommend you buy if you are in Europe

Webroot SecureAnywhere? I just want my computer backed up. There is no feedback that I can find to apprise me of backup status. Too difficult to use due to NO INCONTEXT FEEDBACK.

Loyal Carbonite customer for 15+ years. 20 years of emails gone - they lied to me. No callbacks, no response.

Carbonite LOSES your data. This company is an embarrassment and should disappear. I ordered two disk backups of my computers that had Carbonite installed. NEITHER came with the files intact. I mean, a total loss of data. I spent hours with their technical support, which was a waste of time. I can't believe they even hold themselves out as a reliable cloud backup service when they lose data. The absolute worst company I have ever dealt with, and my data is gone.

I have been a Carbonite member for many years. This past year, 2023, was a continuous stream of emails from Carbonite telling me my back-up was out of date and to download the software again. At least 6 times in the past year. This is not user-friendly and it certainly isn't what I signed up for. I signed up for a full year of trouble-free, transparent and effective back up of my computer. Instead I've got a sometimes it works/sometimes it doesn't waste of time. I have aske for a refund multiple times, but they have adamantly refused even when they check my account and see how many emails they've sent me. I'm stuck until next August 2024 with this user-unfriendly service.

When my Mac laptop died, I didn't worry too much b/c I had Carbonite backup. But trying to find help was a nightmare. First their site makes it very difficult to find useful help. When you finally find and click on Contact Us, instead it just shows you articles, which are very general. A little more searching takes you to real contact methods, where they say chat is an option, but it’s not. Since I am currently outside the US and needed immediate assistance, I had to make an international call, which cost me $15.

Despite spending an hour on the phone with 2 reps, the backup kept stalling even though I followed all their instructions to allow Full Disk access. It has been 9 days now and it has only backed up 13% of my normal-size storage. I have since learned that Apple is making it very difficult for Carbonite’s product to work properly with Apple products. Instead of informing their customers of this, Carbonite pretends to help even though they know that their software simply doesn’t work with Macs with the newer operating systems.

Finally, when I opened my account on my new Mac laptop, instead of recognizing that I already had a subscription, it gave me a trial subscription and kept warning me that it was going to expire even though my current subscription lasts for another 11 months. I cannot find my current subscription on my new laptop.

When I emailed them explaining these problems, I received a cursory response which did not address most of my concerns.

Bottom line: if you have a Mac with Venture OS or later, Carbonite is worthless.

Buyer beware for any financial files quicken quickbooks turbo tax etc.... you cannot retrieve unless you move your entire subscription to a new computer so their advertising misleading any computer any time retrieval. They do not disclose this in their advertising materials. Once my subscription ends going to a different service.

I have been doing online backup with Carbonite since March of 2016. After 7 years of auto renew, I try to retrieve a file I need and when I log on, I am notified that all my data has been purged. My auto renewal payment didn’t process so after 30 days it was purged. Seven years of backups gone! I can’t tell you how much I lost. They claim to have emailed but I can not find any notices. Find another backup company.

Backup works great. Restore is broken. Which means it's really hard and painful to recover your files when you want them. I just spent a half hour on the phone with the Carbonite support rep.
If you are trying to access your files from Windows to Mac or vice versa, you'll have to download them bit by bit, rather than all at once.
If you are trying to download a bunch of your files and some of them happen to be empty files, the downloaded ZIP file Carbonite gives you will be invalid.
If you want to go folder by folder, looking through your files on their website to recover the important ones, and pick out the empty files to remove them from the list of files to be downloaded, you have more patience than me!
Oh, and the rep stressed to me that although the Carbonite download function says it can handle up to 5000 files at once, "smaller downloads are better!" "Can't stress this enough, smaller downloads are better!" "And if you have any ongoing problems with your downloads, please reply to my email and we'll spend the time to go through it and be sure that the website is working for you. And if it's still not working, we'll escalate to Tier 3 support."

So backup is working (?? Maybe?? How would anyone know??!). Restore is broken, at Carbonite, and they won't fix it but they will happily spend your time on support calls to identify their bugs and find workarounds.

So how much time do you have for this? Or you can just pay them $99 for them to ship you a hard drive with your files on it. Yep, going for that, and then cancelling this awful service and hoping to never to do business with them again!