Carbonite for Mac

Carbonite is now offering a free beta trial for Mac users.

Several years ago I tossed out my myriad of Windows, Linux, and "other" systems and switched to a Mac. MacOS X has been good to me, but solid Mac based "SOHO" quality backup applications have been seriously lacking. The best so far has been Time Machine on my new iMac but it still lacks easy set and forget offsite portability. I used to work for a "managed storage as a service" company that was entering the remote office / small office / home power user market using Avamar. I always thought that was a very cool solution but it lacked support for Mac's and wasn't without its bugs.

Carbonite is now offering a free public beta test of its Mac client, so I went and signed up. Signing up is easy, just basic details to get you logged in, and immediately presents you with a Mac based installer. Installing couldn't be easier. Just double click the package you just downloaded and off it goes. It doesn't even require you to re-enter any information, as the package apparently contains your registration information. The default is to automatically back up everything in your User folder. I chose to select what gets backed up, since I have a bunch of things I didn't want to have backed up, like that ISO image of Solaris 10 sitting on my desktop. Selections were easy enough to make, though the selection list didn't always update the icon on certain items after I unselected them even though the buttom to select them again did light up.

Overall my first impression is pretty good. The initial backup is expected to take at least 24 hours (hey, I have a lot of iTunes music and photos from my worldly travels!), afterwich I'll report back on how incremental backups and restores work. One thing to note, you can only select items under your personal Users folder on your primary drive. My external drive I use for Time Machine was selectable but my personal NAS sitting next to it was not, so I assume local USB and Firewire drives could be backed up without the same limitation as the internal OS drive.