I’ve been using Carbonite as my online backup service of choice for about a year now and it works seamlessly in the background sending my important files to the cloud just in case. Until recently that was all it did. A one way upload of files from my machine to the cloud. You could see them but unless you wanted to restore them they were untouchable in a virtual vault somewhere.
That changed just recently when Carbonite Remote Access was launched. Remote Access, as the name suggests, allows you to get access to your archive from just about anywhere via a browser allowing single files to be reached when away from your desktop machine.
Only problem is that it doesn’t work.
Actually I should clarify that statement. Having tested CRA on a number of machines the only one it works on for me is a Windows 2000 workstation with Internet Explorer 6, hardly a common setup. I have tried on IE 6 and 7 and Firefox running on a couple of different machines (XP and Vista) all with the same result. I get the file browser but it is empty (see picture) and clicking on the folder does nothing.
Contacting support also proved fruitless as they didn’t seem to know about CRA let alone how to resolve the issue.
So right now while I can recommend Carbonite for backups I can’t do the same for the Remote Access option which is a shame as I think it has real promise. The company is moving into an already busy space with the likes of Box, Dropbox, Microsoft and my personal favourite Zumo. Carbonite could disturb some of these other players by offering both a backup service along with secure remote access for that ad-hoc requirement for files – providing that they also allow upload of the odd file via the browser, something not currently available.
Hopefully Carbonite will get whatever the problem is fixed and I can do a proper review.
Glad to know I’m not the only one experiencing this problem. I’ve been dealing with it for 2 weeks, and no love so far. Live support’s been useless, and email’s have been largely ignored.
Well since I wrote that it also got posted to my twitter feed and I received a dm from Carbonite saying that they had read the post and wanted to get in touch. That was Friday and I am waiting for the call – if anything useful comes out of it I will post back here.