Carbonite vs SnapShooter

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.

SnapShooter is a backup service for servers, volumes, databases and files hosted on cloud and VPS providers. It was founded in the UK as a bootstrapped company and acquired by DigitalOcean in 2023, and it is popular with developers and small teams who run their own infrastructure rather than a fully managed platform.

The service connects to providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode and UpCloud through their APIs to schedule provider-level snapshots of droplets, instances and volumes. For more portable backups, it runs jobs over SSH that dump MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis databases or archive files and directories, then uploads them to S3-compatible storage you control, such as Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi or DigitalOcean Spaces. Retention rules, schedules, notifications and one-click restores are configured in a web dashboard. Plans are inexpensive and priced by the number of jobs and resources, with a small free tier.

SnapShooter fits indie developers, agencies and SaaS founders running apps on VPS servers who want automated, offsite backups without writing scripts. It is not built for enterprise backup requirements such as compliance reporting or endpoint protection. Teams comfortable with the command line can achieve similar results for free with restic or BorgBackup, while SimpleBackups is the closest hosted competitor. Because the product now sits inside DigitalOcean, check its current plans and roadmap before adopting it for non-DigitalOcean infrastructure.