Carbonite Eliminates 200GB Throttling Cap In Response to Our Article
You may remember an article I wrote back in August titled Two Years Later: My Initial Carbonite Backup Isn’t Completed where I discussed how online backup service Carbonite throttled your upload speed once you uploaded 200GB to its servers, therefore severely impeding people’s ability to complete a full backup if they had a lot of data (such as myself). While I encourage you to read the full story to get all the details, I have some really great news regarding Carbonite’s throttling policy.
This past Friday evening around 9PM ET I received an email from a PR firm on behalf of Carbonite, the email reads:
Hi, Jeff –
I hope you’re already enjoying the weekend!
Following your August article, Two Year Later, My Initial Carbonite Backup Isn’t Completed, Carbonite has taken your remarks about upload speed to heart, eliminated its throttling policies and expanded its bandwidth capability.
With this announcement, small business customers can reduce the time it takes to complete an initial data backup, and Carbonite Home users can do the same and achieve upload speeds of up to 500 percent faster than before.
Hallelujah!
While this is certainly really amazing from my perspective because an article I wrote led to the change of a publicly traded company’s policies, it’s even more amazing because it means a) Carbonite cares about its customers and making the service better and b) People will not have to feel or deal with the frustrations I experienced when using the service. It’s a winning situation all the way around.
The old policy read as followed:
The [Carbonite] bandwidth policy allows you to back up larger amounts of data at a faster speed. After you reach 200GB in your backup, your upload speed will be reduced. The current maximum speeds are as follows:
The first 200GB of data can achieve upload speeds of up to 2 mbps (megabits per second).
At 200GB or more of data, upload speeds are limited to around 100 kbps (kilobits per second).
The new policy, as mentioned, eliminates that 200GB throttling cap. You can read the full details in the official press release, but here’s the good part:
Carbonite has also removed the 200GB throttling cap for new Carbonite Home users, so they can experience the same upload speed capabilities from the first gigabyte of their backup to the last. Over the next several months, this change will be rolled out to existing Carbonite Home customers with backups greater than 200GB.
Carbonite even made a video telling me that they “heard me,” and despite the fact they mistakenly gave me a sex change by changing my name to “Jess” I still appreciate the gesture. You can watch the “We heard you, Jess” video below (my favorite part starts around 25 seconds in).