Labs

Keen Star Wars fans will know that carbonite was the material in which Han Solo was frozen in The Empire Strikes Back. The Carbonite backup service tested here offers unlimited space for around £25 a year.

This is one of the easiest programs to set up, with a simple installation process and few technical decisions to make. The default setting is to back up My Documents and the Desktop,

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but you can make more detailed selections. Files to be backed up are marked with an orange dot, which turns green once they've been uploaded to Carbonite's data centre.

Carbonite Online Backup is designed to work continuously in the background, although you can set backup schedules if necessary. You can suspend the program's activities for 24 hours, or disable it altogether. Although there's no throttle, the program tries not to hog your internet connection, and can be set to low-priority usage.

We found ourselves wishing there was a high-priority mode, though, as Carbonite was one of the slowest products here. Restores were particularly leisurely, whereas most users are likely to want to regain their data with some urgency. We spoke to Carbonite, who confirmed in tests that they could restore a 59MB file in under two minutes. Despite retesting, we couldn't improve our time. Based on our experiences, we can't recommend Carbonite to users with very large amounts of data.