January 1. 2009 18:43

Dave,

One thing you don't really mention in your blog here about the user that has 200GBs of recorded TV shows is that your software actually wouldn't backup these files by default anyways. This is a HUGE problem for a lot of your potential users like myself. My wife and I use our little Canon digital snapshot camera to record little 1 to 4 minute videos of our boys when we are out and about. We consider these to be as important or even more important than the pictures that we take with the same camera. Unfortunately your software automatically excludes these files from being backed up. Each time we off load pictures from our camera, we would have to remember to manually go in and tell Carbonite to backup these small videos. This to me is a deal killer that makes your services unusable for us. We need something that is "set it and forget it" otherwise I guarantee we'll forget to do it.

I understand that you want to try to make your software the easiest solution out there for the common user, but this is a big oversight. If you want to protect yourself from being flooded by huge video files by users that don't really care about their videos, then maybe you could have a software setting that an advanced user could use to make it so that these files are backed up in the future without constant manual intervention.

If I could do that, then I'd be happy to sign up for your service.

Best Regards,
David

David

January 2. 2009 09:35

David: What we think might work well for you is to allow you to set a folder so that it backs up all videos in that folder automatically. That way, when you offload your videos from your camera into that folder, they would automatically be backed up. We're testing this idea and if it works for our customers, we'll put it into production. We've tried backing up all movies by default, and that created a big problem for users who have a lot of downloaded movies and tv shows.

Does this seem like a good solution to you?

David Friend

January 3. 2009 08:07

David Friend,

Unfortunately that is not really a feasible solution for me. When I offload pictures and movies from my little camera, they all go into the same folder for both pictures and the movies. By default each time I offload, they go into a new folder that is named by the date that the pictures are offloaded. So each time I offload the pics and movies, they go into new sub folder. If I were able to tell it to backup all movies in a given parent directory and that trickled down to all sub folders, then that would work for me. But having to put them all in a single directory without sub folders wouldn't work.

Also, I'm not suggesting that you change your software to do them by default. But I am suggesting that you give a more advanced user that knows what they are doing an option somewhere in your software to be able to turn it on, even if it is only for a given directory and all of its sub folders.

Best Regards,
David

David