Having played a key role in popularising online backup services, Carbonite has remained competitive while retaining its signature ease of use. It’s now added an easy way of migrating backups from one PC to another.

The key to the service’s usability is its hand-holding and close integration with Windows. Navigate files and folders as usual, and a simple system of coloured dots and rings shows which are protected or awaiting backup.

To add or remove a file or folder to or from the backup, you just right-click, select Carbonite then choose the appropriate action. To restore, access the online store like a regular drive and select what to restore. It’s so easy you don’t need to think about it.

However, while the initial backup was fast, with some clever bandwidth-throttling and CPU-prioritising features, the restore speed is unimpressive. Also, its continuous backup system doesn’t really back up on-the-fly.

If you’ve already backed up a file that day, you may have to wait hours for changes to be carried across, although you can manually select a new backup.

Files in our music folder weren’t backed up initially, and we had to right-click an MP3 track and select ‘backup all files of this type’ before it was rectified.

Carbonite uses SSL encryption for file transfer and proprietary 1024-bit encryption and a 448-bit Blowfish cypher to safeguard data while in storage at the company’s secure datacenter. Users can now also hold their own encryption keys.

More advanced users may prefer the greater configuration and control provided by Mozy, but if you’re backing up more than 2GB of data and don’t want to micromanage it, Carbonite remains our online backup service of choice.