I wanted to bring to your attention another very nice review of Carbonite. This one, by Mike, at Simply Offsite is thoughtful and balanced, IMHO. In the comments on his blog, I did try to explain why it's very hard for Carbonite to have an "estimated time to completion" indication for the initial backup like some other backup services do. The reason, in short, is that Carbonite allocates bandwidth dynamically so that it never interferes with your browsing. If you're using the Internet for other things, Carbonite will automatically slow down to get out of the way. So we can't tell you how long your backup is going to take because it depends on whether you'll be using your computer in the meantime. Other backup services transfer data at a steady pace. So while that makes the backup time predictable, it also means that your computer is going to feel really sluggish while the backup is going on – not a good thing.
— Dave
CEO, Carbonite
