Carbonite Backup Service

For a few years, I was using Carbonite and I was quite happy. But like all services, from Electricity to Internet to Cable TV, folks got greedy and the price crept up. While the price of storage and price of internet goes down, the prices of Carbonite creeps up. So two years ago I did some research and switched to another service.

Wasabi [Hot Cloud Storage] provides a naked cloud storage service with an AWS interface. So you need a backup application and after some research, I found Cloudberry. It seemed the best at the time. They have since been purchased by another company. Cloudberry is a simple but functional backup application that can use Wasabi, among others, for cloud storage.

My backup requirements are about 750GB total. Across all my computers I have many TB of storage, but what I need to backup is much smaller. I move the data I need to backup to one computer using a Synch application and then the backup function runs in the middle of the night to back the files up to the cloud.

As it turns out however, The Cloudberry / Wasabi solution is the same cost as the Carbonite service. Ignoring the cost of the Coudberry one time cost, the Wasabi charges are $6/mo for 1TB or less. And the Carbonite plan is the same cost. And Carbonite is simpler to deal with and understand. So I’m going back to Carbonite. I’ve started the free trial. But how is the back up going?

Checking Backup Progress

So I need to check on Carbonite to see how much it’s backing up each night from 11pm to 6am. One way is to look at my router. It shows a graph like this:

But the problem is that this graph does not show the carbonite traffic, but the whole network. The left graph shows all traffic and the right graph shows upload only, so clearly this is the backup traffic, while the left graph show my binge watching White Dragon last night on Amazon Prime streaming. Great show by the way. For some reason, the router did not show the name of the computer. Maybe because the traffic was encrypted over HTTPS.

GlassWire – Better Traffic Logging

GlassWire is a pretty cool application. I messed around with PerfLogs in windows 10 and looked at some other things, but nothing shows a nice graph like GlassWire.

Glasswire even automatically switched to a “Dark Theme” on my backup computer where I use a dark theme in windows. Very cool. Notice that the graph has 5 min, 3 hours, 24 hours, week and month options for the length of the graph as well as sliders on the bottom to adjust the time frame of the graph. The graph is stored in a database.

Excellent. Except.

Like a lot of these applications, they default to using the System disk as their log / database storage. Cloudberry stored it’s database on the system drive, and one of my gripes that I had to figure out how to move it to another drive. I have a system SSD so I’d like to avoid constant traffic to that drive if possible. No need to wear out the system SSD with the backup solution. Also, when I pointed cloudberry’s database to the same drive as the backup drive, Cloudberry was doing lots of extra processing because it kept seeing some change to the drive when it modified it’s own database. Hum…. I fixed this by adding another small spinning hard drive for only the Cloudberry database. Problem solved. And it’s been working fine for a couple of years now.

Well GlassWire has the same problem as Cloudberry. I need to move the Logging database for GlassWire to the local spinning hard drive. And they don’t just provide a setting for that like they should. A forum post from 2014 showed the solution. Edit a config file.

So after the change and a reboot to restart the GlassWire service, now you can see the Resource Monitor showing that the database traffic is going to the Local Spinning hard drive rather than the system SSD. Voila.

So over the next few days I’ll check the Glasswire graph to see how Carbonite is coming along with it’s backup.

Btw. With Cloudberry / Wasabi, no decision is made about which files are backed up. You need to set the folders and all the files are backed up. Carbonite has no option for “just backup everything” and leaves out audio and video files.

But since I have Audio books [ MP3 ] and some videos [MP4, AVI, etc.] that I want to backup. I need to set a lot of files to backup that Carbonite would normally ignore. The easy way to do this is to use the Search feature in the file explorer.

Choose a folder at the top of a tree where MP3, MP4 files are.
Search for the type of the files using *.mp3 and for multiple file types use OR between them like this: *.mp3 OR *.mp4
Use CTRL/A to select all the files that it found.
Right click and choose Carbonite > Back This Up
Now the little dot from Carbonite appears on the File Icon showing it’s going to be backed up.

I’ll be checking in with GlassWire over the next few days to see how Carbonite is doing with the 750GB backup of my stuff.

Cheers,
:ww

Update After One Night Backup

Oh. 16GB in one night. Hummm. How long will that take?

750GB / 16GB per day = 46 Days. Well. Looks like we’ll see how fast it is after we get Ziply 1GBps installed.

In other news, I considered a purchase of GlassWire. It is normally $39 for the single computer license. And I got a 25% off “coupon” if I purchased in the next 10 minutes. But wait there is more. The now $29 is not for a license, but it is a yearly subscription. And I’m not going to be using it that much. So NO. $39 for a one time purchase would have been reasonable. Even if I needed to purchase each upgrade every couple of years. But not another $40/year for a subscription. Not that they have done any upgrades in years. But Nope. No sale.

Oh. And if you want to take a region of the screen as a screenshot in Windows 10, use Windows key / SHIFT/ S. Important tip.

Oh and one more thing. I looked back at my Carbonite subscription. My records show I paid $60/year in 2016, 2017, and in 2018 it went up to $72 / year. Which is where it is now. But of course that is what Wasabi is charging too. So back to Carbonite for the simpler interface at the same price. Again. I’m confused about why Moore’s Law does not reduce the price over time. Storage has gotten cheaper, not more expensive. Oh well.