20
Apr
09

Carbonite Backup Slows Down My Computer

By Joshua Steimle 17 Comments Categories: Reviews & How-To

I used to use Mozy a year or two ago, but the service was too spotty. I got errors all the time and it took forever to create the first backup. That is, I left it on 24/7 and I think it took well over a month. Maybe it’s better today. I then didn’t use anything but external hard drives , and then more recently I signed up for Carbonite which I’ve now been using for several months. Other than Carbonite’s lack of support for backing up external hard drives I can’t complain about much, except that I just realized that Carbonite seriously slows down my computer, which is funny because you’d think they would work really hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Now, before anyone says “Well, you can’t use it on old, slow computers” I’m using dual 2.0 GHz processors with 2 GB of RAM. Yeah, I could get a faster machine, but this should be plenty fast to run Carbonite without everything else slowing down to a crawl.

For a few months I had no idea what it was. Video playback was choppy, and many heavier programs like Photoshop and Illustrator were slow the open. But it was off and on. Sometimes things would be slow and sometimes they wouldn’t be. Of course now I know that’s because sometimes Carbonite was backing up and sometimes it wasn’t, depending on whether there was anything to back up.

The solution was pretty straightforward–schedule Carbonite to only run at nights, instead of all the time. I just wish I had known earlier that Carbonite was the issue.

Related posts:

  1. Carbonite and external drives don’t mix.
  2. The Online Backup Solution I Need Doesn’t Exist
  3. My First Computer Experience
  • http://eliteeternity.com Jeremy Blake

    I’ve been thinking about getting Carbonite for a while now. Interesting to hear an opinion about it from someone I know. They have an affiliate program, you may want to sign up and toss your link in this post. That’s what I would do. Selling out is such an easy trap to fall into. ;)

  • Joshua Steimle

    I fell into that trap years ago. I’m just trying to find out how to fall even deeper.

  • http://www.dterryphotography.com David Terry

    I bought a new computer thinking my old computer had SEVERE hard disk performance issues.

    My brand new computer was super fast, I was pleased with how it was running as I began installing all of my old software onto the new computer. One of the very last things that I installed was Carbonite. That’s when it became obvious. My brand new super fast computer suddenly had the SAME sever hard disk performance issues as the computer it was replacing.

    Luckily you can schedule Carbonite to only run at night. But I spent almost a year with slow performance cussing at my old computer and spent money buying a new one … all because of a piece of software which claimed to have no impact on computer performance.

    I wish I had found out earlier!

    Just beware. Other than the performance issues, I’m fairly happy with Carbonite. But I highly recommend you let it do it’s thing only at night when you’re sleeping.

  • http://brian.sweeting.net Brian Sweeting

    You should give Backblaze a try. $5/month/computer or $50/year/computer for unlimited backup. Also backs up external hard drives. I haven’t noticed it slowing down my computer at all. Once your initial backup is complete, it runs just once an hour. http://www.backblaze.com

  • Tony

    I’ve tried numerous time to set my backup schedule to night but carbonit keeps setting it back to automatic (recommneded). They sent me a patch for the schedule and it crashed my computer. i’ve emailed several times but no help so far. If it doesn’t get resolved I will move to another service…Brian’s comments on Backblaze gives me hope for somthing to move on to.

  • Brenda

    I use Carbonite, and just pause it for a few hours while I am working on my computer. Easy to do, stops it quickly, and no slow down.

  • http://www.westlake-it.co.uk IT Support Hampshire

    Brilliant post! I think the punchline is great – A simple solution too! I do my backups and virus scanning at night too.

  • Goumba

    I have used Carbonite for about 4 months and it has put my computer into a crawl mode. Four to nine minutes just on startup and forever program startup. Forget about search engines , mail and the like. I worked my brains to a pea size from safe mode to alamode to the point that I started to remove programs and the like until I came upon Carbonite. With some hesitation and what the hell out it went and bang boom bam and wella my baby was back. Carbonite is very evil in a sense that the average user with little computer knowledge like me is screwed in the world of speed.

  • http://www.gatekeepermen.us Gape

    Carbonite is taking 40% – 70% of my processor when I have it on pause. Why? My computer is running at 100% utilization when I have a single SpreadSheet open. I thought when I was deleting the McSvHost.exe module from McAfee beta version, I was solving my problems. Do I need to delete Carbonite modules also when I already told it “TO PAUSE” – come on Carbonite – give me a break!

  • Steve

    Carbonite does have some serious problems, but I haven’t noticed it slowing down my computer. For me, I’ve been running this for a few days longer than a month and I still have 50GB left of my 200GB of data left to upload. This is waaaaaaaaaay too slow. I feel like I’m trying to drain a lake one spoon full at a time.

    Another problem I noticed on XP, but not on Win 7, is that Carbonite will interfere with the creation of new files in Windows Explorer. If you create a brand new file the usual behavior is for Windows to leave the filename field editab;e so that you could give it its first name. Carbonite does something that forces it to confirm that default name.

    Another problem is that you can’t go to your online account pull items from your backup if they have certain characters in their filenames. I don’t know if this prevents pulling data for a true restore too, but that’s a pretty scary limitation.

    Carbonite really needs to crank up the upload speed. Good grief I hope it doesn’t take this long to restore data too.

  • Morell E. Mullins

    Carbonite tonight has been “backing up” for an hour and will not respond when I right click to pause it. Nor will it even let me into carbonite information center. I am fed up. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened.

  • Morgan @kerrville photographer

    Virtual memory is just a part of operating system on desktops PC as everybody aware of it,RAM is used probably for CPU but all that is tha RAM is not enough to execute all kid of programs.
    There is where virtual memory works it helps programmer to run the programs fluentlyit also help to keep the data onto harddisk.Overall virtual memory acts as a heart of computers

  • Mike

    I’ve had Carbonite for years and had no problems that I’d notice until I had to restore a crashed hard drive, or so I thought.

    The computer ran dog slow on start up and loading programs before my crash.

    After doing a fresh windows xp pro install, with drive format, I began installing programs.

    After installing carbonite I notice the dramatic slowing of all system on the computer. Everything took forever. 10 minutes boot up.

    What really got my attention was that the hard drive was contantly running. I mean contantly. My drive is a 400gb and I only have about 10% used. Two days after the carbonite install with the drive still working like crazy I checked the drive properties. Cabonite had written enough data on the drive to take my unused space down to 50%.

    I uninstalled carbonite and all of a sudden the drive isn’t racing and the drive space is immediatly back to normal 10% of used space.

    Have emailed the company and gotten no response in two days.

    This has gotten me thinking that maybe a more traditional backup system with a mirrored hard drive may be a better solution for me.

    Anyone else have this problem?

    Mike

  • Ron

    Yes, I have the same issue. Took 2+ weeks to back up 106GB. Now my machine is absolulty worthless, 12 min to boot, forever to open files and links, audio badly skipping. I paused Carbonite and changes the back up schedule, still no improvement. My machine is 5 years old and never had an issue. I have read that you need a really high speed CPU and tons of memory to run without this problem. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on a new machine and then go through the hassle of up loading all my files just to run Carbonite successfully. Why has’nt Carbonite fixed this problem???? If I can’t get this fixed, I amgoing to demand my money bcak and dump Carbonite. Does any one know how to fix this?

  • Stu Cook

    Same issue here. My new Mac Book Pro runs as slow as a dog when Carbonite is running. That’s it for me. Multiple HD backups, Carbonite sucks.

  • Rick Chaisse

    CLone Your Hard Drive with Acronis Migrate Easy or other program. Then Put it away somewhere safe.
    Do incremental backups from that point on.
    When your hard drive crashes, replace it with the clone. Then copy over your backup files.
    Perform updates.
    You’re up and running in no time.

  • Mary Bellon

    When I first installed Carbonite I thought it caused my new fast computer to slow to a crawl so I put it on only at night schedule. After a recent Windows 7 update and the clean up I had to do I decided to allow Carbonite to be on at all times. There is no doubt in my mind that Carbonite is the culprit. It is back to night duty. Wish they would fix this. Sorry I bought a three year contract.