With all the hullabaloo about Carbonite recently, I've been thinking about the value of trust when it comes to data backup and data protection companies.

For those who don't know, it was recently found out that Carbonite faked a number of five star reviews on Amazon.com. This set off a small firestorm of controversy over the ethics of some of the people at the company. To many, however, it was just a company trying to get a little positive publicity that backfired a little. For most, it really wasn't a mark on their main business of online, secure backup.

I happen to disagree. Online backup, and especially data security, are businesses of trust. If you feel like you can't trust a company to be honest in it's marketing, how much of their other marketing is bogus? How secure is their data center? How well does their software verify your backup data? You don't know anymore. They could really be making up anything at this point.

Ultimately, you have to take the company's word and if they're lying about one thing, how do you know they are lying about others? You're sending the most sensitive data you have over the internet to some ultimately unknown location. Trust must be an integral part of this process.

What you'd really like to do it not have to trust anyone! If you run backups, be sure to test them and see how long it takes to get your data back and that it's still in one piece. Don't take assurances that you data will be fine. Also, handle security yourself if you can. What I like about JungleDisk is that my data is encrypted before Amazon.com sees it on their servers. I don't have to worry about JungleDisk or Amazon.com being secure since I've already handled that step myself (and verified it myself too.)

There is, of course, a certain amount of trust that you must put in the company. I personally would rather trust a data center that is redundantly backed up and global (Amazon.com) than one that is only located in a small data center on the east coast (nearly every other backup service). I can also buy backup software from a company that concentrates on backup software and my data center is run by a company that concentrates on data centers. I don't have to trust them with everything and can even switch one or the other at a later time, if I need to. I'd rather be in control than have to rely on people I may not trust. I also pay by the month and am not locked into a yearly contract that I'd have to go through the hassle of canceling. If I switch to a data center other than Amazon.com, I can remove all my data from their servers and no longer pay anything for their service.

I still recommend JungleDisk for these reasons and more. It's just a better solution, even if it isn't as slick and fancy as some of the other backup services. It's a little extra work to set up, but it keeps you in control of what you're doing.

Trust me.

It's sad to hear it after hearing good things about the company, but it looks like Carbonite has faked five star reviews on Amazon.com. This doesn't mean their product is bad, but a lot of what goes into selecting a remote backup solution is whether you can trust the company or not. If this is how they promote their product, I'd feel a lot less secure about how they run their company.

I've also had reservations about the fact that they only have one data center where they keep your data and don't really keep backups of that. There are many legitimate one star reviews of Carbonite that talk about users not being able to get their data back during a restore. That is completely unacceptable for a backup solution.

I want to apologize for recommending or even thinking that this is a good solution. I recommend never even looking at Carbonite as a remote backup solution.