Highly Recommend It for Home & Small Business
I've been using it since near its beginning. For myself and many of my clients, I use it as an element of a multi-tier backup strategy that includes station imaging and on-site bulk backups. I rely upon Carbonite for the daily off-site aspect of my backup strategy. For a reasonable price, it offers two big aspects that are difficult for most home users and small businesses: Automation and off-site redundancy.
The author is correct that doing a full restore from Carbonite would be unacceptably slow in a business setting. However, combined with a traditional local media backup, this isn't the case; a fast local restore can be performed by traditional media, only relying upon Carbonite for the latest data not up-to-date on the local media.
Also, remember that unless you're executing and taking your daily backups off-site with you each and every day, your traditional backup will be completely useless in the case of fire, theft or other disaster that might befall your home or customer site. At that point, you really won't care if it takes a few days to get it all back.
I have never had to attempt a "full" restore using Carbonite, and hope that I never will. However, I have used it many times to recover individual files that have become accidentally deleted or corrupted by users. Carbonite even keeps several generations of regularly changed files. The operation is simple and takes but minutes.
The reality is that for most home users and SMBs without trained IT staff on site who's sworn job is to guarantee the survival of the company's data, reliable regular backups simply do not happen. Carbonite is the simplest way to change that.
