Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Carbonite vs Amazon S3 , the Slant community recommends Carbonite for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud backup services?” Carbonite is ranked 9th while Amazon S3 is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Carbonite is:
For users in the US there is a option to receive their backup data on external media, meaning not only is there a backup in the cloud but you can order hard backups anytime.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Users can order a physical copy of their data
For users in the US there is a option to receive their backup data on external media, meaning not only is there a backup in the cloud but you can order hard backups anytime.
Pro Intuitive software
Does not require deep system knowledge to operate Carbonite's software.
Pro Unlimited online storage
The $59.99/yr plan gets you unlimited cloud storage.
Pro Allows for personal encryption keys
Pro Free for small sites
The free tier will cover most personal home pages.
Pro Easily scalable
There's no cap in storage or traffic. Cost is based on usage.
Pro Super cheap with a year's worth of free service
S3 storage costs $0.03 per GB and gets cheaper the more is stored, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests are $0.005 per 1,000 requests and GET and all other requests are $0.004 per 10,000 requests. And with some restrictions is available for free for a year.
Pro Fast setup
You can provision a S3 bucket, upload files, setup the DNS, and go live in under 10 minutes.
Pro Fast
S3 is fast even without a CDN.
Pro Easy to setup with CDN
Simple to set up with Amazon's CloudFont CDN.
Pro Supports custom root domains
To set up a custom domain, Amazon Route 53 has to be configured as the DNS provider with the domain registrar, two buckets have to be created and configured with the name the same as the domain - one including, one excluding www. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.
Pro No security risks
There's no server to manage, so no security issues to patch or keep watch.
Cons
Con They've lost data before
There have been occasions where a paid subscriber was not ever able to get back their data.
Con No external hard drive support in the $59.99/yr plan
You need to upgrade to the HomePlus $99.99/yr plan to back up external drives.
Con Personal encryption keys only work on Windows
Con Files above 4GB have to be uploaded manually
Carbonite won't upload files above 4GB unless you do it manually.
Con Credit card needed
Amazon will try to retrieve the money every month after one year trial. If you have no money you will be banned.
Con Setting up automatic public permissions is confusing
By default, S3 sets uploaded files to private. You can configure your S3 bucket to auto-apply public permissions by copying and pasting a template. But the template might be intimidating to some users.
Con Confusing web interface
Amazon S3's web interface is quite confusing, especially for first-time users, but there are many tutorials online that help beginners to set up a static site on S3.
Con No SFTP support
Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used.
