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Article · Nov 13, 2015

Ask a Carbonista: Which Carbonite Personal plan is right for me?

Ask a Carbonista: Which Carbonite Personal plan is right for me?

Carbonite Personal plans are designed to help people protect their digital lives. But different people have different backup needs. So we designed each Carbonite Personal plan to reflect the different needs related to computer setup, what data needs to be backed up, and how fast you need to recover. Here are some things to consider when picking a Carbonite Personal plan:

Do you have an external hard drive?
If you’re storing data on an external drive you’ll want to use Carbonite Personal Plus or Carbonite Personal Prime. Carbonite Personal Basic is a great solution for your internal drives but doesn’t support externals, so Plus or Prime are your best bests.

Do you record a lot of videos?
If the answer is yes, you’ll probably want to use Carbonite Personal Prime. Because of the massive data storage involved in backing up videos, Carbonite Personal Basic and Carbonite Personal Plus require you to manually select which videos you want to back up. Carbonite Personal Prime backs up videos automatically.

Do you need to get back to work right away?
Most of our Personal Plans back up directly to the cloud. Therefore, to recover that data you’ll have to download it from the cloud. While you can recover individual files in a matter of seconds, recovering your entire backup can take up to a few days if you have a major disaster. Carbonite Personal Prime includes our courier recovery service, which means that in the event of a disaster we can ship a hard drive to you overnight so you can get your files back and get back to work. This is one of the reasons we recommend Personal Prime for anyone who runs a business out of their home.

Ready to get started with Carbonite Personal? Download your free trial today!

Got a question you'd like to Ask a Carbonista? Just send it to AskaCarbonista@Carbonite.com.

Author

Ryan Harnedy

IT Community Manager

Ryan Harnedy is the IT Community Manager for Carbonite. He blogs about technology, IT trends, and best practices for SMB IT pros.

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