Carbonite Safe Review: Doing what iCloud can’t

There’s something to be said for creating an application that doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles, but instead hones in, performs its core functions well, saves and restores data, and builds its reputation that way. This is the key premise to Carbonite Safe, which requires macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or later to install and run.

Carbonite Safe starts at the Basic plan of $6/month or $71.99/year, with its Plus and Prime subscription plans offering access to Webroot antiviral software, allowing an external volumes to be uploaded, and complimentary courier services of recovered data files if need be. The company even offers a 15-day free trial with no credit or debit card information needing to be sent along, rare these days.

Carbonite Safe has long been considered an excellent application to store data online and it’s easy to see why. After installing the software and granting it full access to your Mac’s hard drive, it’s easy to choose specific files and folders to upload to an unlimited storage space, even under the Basic account.

See how Carbonite Safe compares to other cloud based backups for Mac.

You can select specific data to back up, such as your Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, or Movies folder, or choose your entire Mac internal hard drive to back up and Carbonite Safe will plow into the task, steadily uploading your data to the company’s servers.

True to form as a recovery utility, the application’s recovery features are impressive, and can either download data and insert it back into its original location or to a specified location. This, in turn, can help reload all of your previous data onto a crashed and rebuilt Mac, albeit your data throughput over the Internet may be slower than cloning your previous data from a Time Machine or other local backup drive.

Still, there are wrinkles to iron out. While it wasn’t a deal breaker by any means, installation and setting up full access to my Mac’s hard drive was a little harder than expected, and instead of the installer performing this task and asking for my system password, it suggested that I open my Privacy and Security settings, locate Carbonite Safe, and add this on my own, which was a bit unexpected.

Where other foibles are concerned, the Basic tier subscription doesn’t cover automatic backing up of video files, which seems arbitrary (though logical, as these tend to be the largest files on your hard drive, and you can see where Carbonite would charge slightly more to store these).

Finally, while the application offers quick access to its help files and support site, the instructional videos for the Mac version of Carbonite Safe seem to be nowhere to be found, which feels like an ardent kick in the teeth from the company’s marketing department.

Should you buy Carbonite Safe

There’s something good here, and if you’ve heard positive things about Carbonite Safe over the years, these positive comments are valid. It’s easy to back up your data, restore it, select exactly where it’ll go, and this is one of the few utilities that can help take a crashed Mac and effectively restore all of your data if you’re willing to wait for everything to download (as opposed to using Time Machine on an external drive or another local backup technique). As such, this is worth trying out and potentially worth subscribing to. It’s not the flashiest application out there, but it knows what it needs to achieve and accomplishes this, and despite a few foibles that could be ironed out, is worthy of your attention.

We also look at backup solutions for Macs.

Author: Chris Barylick, Contributor, Macworld