Carbonite vs Restic

Carbonite is a cloud backup service for individual computers, small business PCs and servers. It was founded in Boston in 2005, bought the security company Webroot in 2019 and was itself acquired by the Canadian software group OpenText in late 2019 for about $1.42 billion. Its core job: install an agent, let it continuously copy your files to encrypted cloud storage, and restore them after a crash, theft or ransomware attack.

Personal plans (Basic, Plus, Prime) cover one computer with unlimited cloud storage; Plus and Prime add one external hard drive and automatic video backup, and Prime adds courier recovery options. Business plans are priced per account rather than per device: Core covers up to 25 computers, external drives and NAS with 250 GB, while Power and Ultimate add server backup, 500 GB, bare metal image restore and application-aware backup. All plans are billed annually; extra business storage costs $99 per 100 GB.

Carbonite fits households and small offices that want backup to run without thinking about it. It is weaker for power users: storage caps on business plans are low for the price, there is no monthly billing, and restores of large data sets are slow over the internet. Backblaze offers simpler unlimited personal backup, IDrive covers many devices on one plan for less, and Acronis bundles backup with stronger endpoint security.

Buying tip: the prices on the plans page are first-year discounts (up to 35% off list), and renewals revert to the higher list price, so compare the renewal cost, not the promo, against Backblaze and IDrive.

restic is a free, open-source command-line backup program written in Go and released under the BSD 2-Clause license. It started as a personal project of Alexander Neumann and has become one of the most trusted backup tools among system administrators, developers and self-hosters.

restic stores backups as encrypted, deduplicated, content-addressed snapshots, so after the first run only changed data is uploaded and every snapshot behaves like a full backup. Repositories can live on a local disk, SFTP, a REST server, Amazon S3 and S3-compatible storage, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, OpenStack Swift, or any of the dozens of backends supported through rclone. Compression is supported in newer repository formats, the check command verifies integrity, forget and prune apply retention policies, and snapshots can be browsed by mounting them as a filesystem. Binaries are available for Linux, macOS, Windows and BSD.

restic fits people who are comfortable with the terminal and want fast, secure backups for servers, laptops and NAS devices. It has no built-in scheduler or graphical interface, so you combine it with cron, systemd timers or community wrappers such as resticprofile, autorestic or Backrest. BorgBackup is the closest alternative with excellent compression but fewer native cloud backends, Kopia offers a similar design with an official GUI, and Duplicati or commercial tools are friendlier for non-technical users.