Carbonite Saves My Balls, or: Battle of the Ugly Software

I've been using Carbonite for a while, and just recently it paid for itself. After all my Photoshop CS3 hassles, I finally gave in and reformatted and reinstalled, making sure to copy all my important stuff to a local networked drive .. or so I thought. You see, I'm rather absent minded, and when I went to copy my stuff over, I deleted what was there first .. .. and then got distracted and read a book instead (damn you, Malcom Gladwell, you popsci cad!). Of course, I forgot that I'd forgotten all this, and then went ahead and formatted my drive and reinstalled Vista.

Carbonite's here-are-your-balls-back process (AKA 'restoration') is remarkably easy, though it's also disgustingly slow (on a 6mbit line its only restored 6GB out of 40 in the past 27 hours), and the client's horrible UI hasn't made things better - there's no way to re-prioritize the restoration once its begun, and it sucks having to wait for 35GB of photos to restore before it gives me back my oh-so-important documents.

So while this is a validation of the whole online backup deal, it's actually pushing me further towards Carbonite's competitor Mozy, which has a web interface to your files, a properly-designed client, and no bandwidth caps .. although its website looks like it was built using a stock template with cheap iStockPhoto images. Blech.

PS Because it's so Taiwanese-hardware-manufacturer-client-software-style ugly, there's no screenshots of the client available on Carbonite's website, so here's what you're missing out on: