Carbonite vs Rewind

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.

Rewind is a backup and recovery service for SaaS data, built by a company based in Ottawa, Canada. It protects data that cloud platforms do not back up on your behalf, including Shopify store content, GitHub repositories and metadata, Jira and Confluence, QuickBooks Online and Trello. Under the shared responsibility model, SaaS vendors keep their infrastructure running, but accidental deletions, faulty app installs, bad imports and malicious changes remain the customer's problem.

Rewind runs automated backups, typically daily, and keeps a versioned history of items. Users can restore a single product, theme, issue, page or transaction, or roll back a whole account to an earlier point. For GitHub it captures repositories along with metadata such as issues and pull requests, a capability it expanded by acquiring BackHub, and for Atlassian products it is available through the Atlassian Marketplace. Pricing is per user per month for the platform you back up, with a Standard plan, an Advanced plan for compliance needs and custom Enterprise contracts.

Rewind fits merchants, engineering teams and finance departments for whom losing data in Shopify, GitHub, Jira or QuickBooks would be costly, and it supports retention requirements for compliance. Costs add up when several apps are protected, coverage is limited to supported platforms, and restores of complex, interconnected data can be partial. GitProtect is an alternative for code repositories, Spanning and Backupify cover Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and Own, now part of Salesforce, specializes in Salesforce data.