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Wednesday, February 14, 2007
I couldn’t begin to tell you how many clients I’ve had that call telling me in near tears that their hard drive just took a dump and begging me to please save the data on it. My first question (even though I already know the answer due to the desperation in their voice,) is if they’ve made back-ups. No is always the answer. Always. After some deep probing using some sweet tools on hand, I usually am able to recover missing data most of the time. After I do return the data on DVD-ROMs, I go into the “make sure you do back-ups regularly” speech and offer my services in this department. I know it falls on deaf ears. (In fact, one client called me three different times with the same problem within a years time. The third time was not the charm. Dead drive that I could not help with.)
I practice what I preach. In fact, I’m paranoid with my data. I have two local archives done on-site and one set of archives online. My mail is also on an Exchange server hosted outside my office, thus that gets the triple-protection stamp. With the online service, I have to be stingy with what I back up since I have hundreds of gigs of data, mostly due to my pictures and music. That is until I found Carbonite.
Carbonite is unlike any other online service I’ve seen before as it makes backing up your data easy and economical. Carbonite is pushing itself heavily during its ramp-up phase and offering a free month of unlimited backup without a credit card using certain promo codes. It’s easy to find that code. Once you’re signed up, backing up is as easy as either accepting the default (My Documents folder) or going the manual route and right clicking folders or files and selecting “Back this up” from the Carbonite menu item. Really, it’s that easy! Depending on your amount of data you’ll be backing up, you’re looking at a few hours (or days) of getting all your files securely archived before real-time back-ups occur which then happens in seconds. After a file changes (or is created within a selected folder for back-up), it’s backed up according to your settings (such as wait until idle Internet usage.) Peace of cake.
Restoring is even easier. Open your new “Carbonite Secure Backup” icon in My Computer and drill down to your file or folder you wish to restore. Right clicking it reveals a menu with options such as Restore and Restore to. Select one and follow the prompts. You can also just drag-and-drop the object as well. That easy!
As for information, Carbonite does not lack here. Dots help paint a picture about your files for you. Little blue dots on your file or folder visually indicate that object is schedule for back-up, yellow defines back-up in progress, and green tells ya that it was successfully backed up. Of course the red dot means trouble was encountered. A colored themed lock icon in the Task Tray also follows the same color code chart of the dots. At any time, you can double click the lock icon by your system clock which will bring up the InfoCenter. Yup, you can guess what this will tell you.
Okay, there are some things Carbonite won’t do. It doesn’t archive data from external drives (such as USB or Firewire drives), flash drives, and mapped network drives. Files 2 GB or larger it won’t touch either. System or executables are not backed up unless you manually add them to your archive list.
Once your free trail is over, you can have all this for only $49.95 for a full year. That’s unlimited space for $50! Incredible, huh?! Now granted, who knows how long Carbonite will be able to last at this price (or last at all) and if your data will there when you need it because Carbonite isn’t, but that’s why you still do local back-ups, too. 
Be paranoid like me and you won’t be like one of my customers at the end of the day.
February 14th, 2007 at 21:50
Sven,
I’ve been using both Carbonite and Mozy for over a year (Carbonite only backed up photos photos when I began online backup). May I encourage you to try Mozy and contrast it to Carbonite. Where Carbonite is simple and unlimited, Mozy is both plus much much more and does not limit the type of file or size of file. There’s a nice comparison matrix on Mozy.com. But, Kudos on recommending online backup to your clients.
Don
February 14th, 2007 at 22:04
Thanks, Don, for the heads-up on Mozy. I like how you can check files online via a web browser which was one of the first things I checked if Carbonite could do (but was dismayed to find it couldn’t.) Mozy can and I like that big time. Otherwise, on a whole, Carbonite and Mozy seem pretty darn neck-and-neck. Once my Carbonite backup finishes (at 67% two days after the initial backup,) I’ll give Mozy a try.
February 15th, 2007 at 12:51
Check out the online backup smackdown…
SystemSafe vs. Carbonite
February 15th, 2007 at 12:54
Here it is…
The Backup Smackdown! (click)
March 4th, 2007 at 22:20
Before you go and click the The Backup Smackdown link please be aware that while the feature set does look good indeed. The price of the two solutions (Carbonite and SystemSafe) does not compare at all. Carbonite wins hands down in this area which is probably the single biggest factor of the two products.
January 16th, 2008 at 5:50
Hi, i try both Carbonite and Mozy, and i found that are quite slow during the back up process. Furthermore, their back up is not in real time but you have to schedule timings. Recently i try also a new start up from Europe, MEMOPAL faster and with real time back up. Much better i think.