Product Reviews

Business users may have all sorts of high-tech layers of protection to fall back on, but for home users online backup remains by far the simplest route to disaster recovery. The reasons are obvious: it requires no additional hardware in the home; it eliminates the possibility of losing the backups themselves, and it is almost entirely automated.

Carbonite has been our favourite way of doing this since we first reviewed it more than a year ago, and version 3.5 brings a few new features to the table.

While you've always been able to protect multiple PCs with Carbonite (for an additional fee) you can now very simply migrate a backup from one PC to another. So when you buy that new laptop you don't have to copy all your files over, just install Carbonite on it, go to the website and transfer the account across. You can then access all your backed up files as normal.

Unusually,

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given Carbonite's always-on way of working, you can now schedule the backup to automatically suspend at particular points of the day so it doesn't interrupt your internet browsing at peak times. Plus, files are backed up incrementally, so only elements of files that have changed need sending.

Other than that it's business as usual for Carbonite. It's still as cheap as before - a highly reasonable £25 per year for unlimited storage. And it still uses the same hands-off approach, with an initial wizard choosing your most likely backup folders and starting the process; further files or folders can be backed up with a simple right-click. You can even apply a low priority mode to place it behind Skype and other voice communications in the pecking order for bandwidth.

Recovery of files is as intuitive as the backup process: you get a simple Backup Drive shortcut on the desktop, which takes you straight to an Explorer-style window containing your protected files and folders. As with a backup, a simple right-click can bring anything back and, as of this version, file versions are now retained for up to 90 days, so you can roll back if you don't like changes you've made in a recent save.

There are many online backup services available, but for home users there's still nothing out there to match Carbonite's blend of intuitive operation and incredible price. With backup this cheap and simple, there can be no more excuses not to do it.