Carbonite - Online Backup For Your Files
What if your computer died on you. Right now. I don’t mean blue screen of death or the swirlly beach ball of doom kind of death. I’m talking smoke and flames, dropped down the stairs, hit with a mallet or peanut butter sandwich shoved into the disk drive kind of death.
What would you lose that was irretrievable? What would you lose that was critical to you? How totally hosed would you be if your data disappeared back into the ones and zeros from whence it came?
But you’re backing up every night, aren’t you? Okay - every week? Er…. every year? Yeah. That’s what I thought.
We know better. We know we should be backing up regularly. Yet it’s one of those things that always gets put off and put off until it’s too late. I’ve had a catastrophic loss of data in the past, but even I’m still dodgey about how often I back up. Currently I have an external drive that I back up to, but my last full backup, I hate to admit, was back in October.
Of course, even if I were diligent in my backing up to the external, it wouldn’t be of much use in the instance of a major disaster at the home such as a fire, flood or tornado. Enter Carbonite.
Carbonite encrypts and then saves my data to a secure server where I can access it from pretty well anywhere. So even if the hand of god reaches down from the clouds and smotes the house into charred ruins, I can just log on to their site from my new computer and download all my files as if nothing had happened. But best of all, it happens without me needing to think about it. Every time I create a new file or make changes to an existing one, it jumps into the queue for backup. From the moment I boot up, Carbonite begins firing packets away for safe storage.
Currently I’m on a free, 3-month trial of the service, made available to me through BzzAgent. At trial’s end, the service would cost $49.95 US for a year or $89.95 US for two years worth of coverage. I’ve not yet decided if I’m going to carry forward with it, but all in all that is not a bad price - and it would save me from ever again having to worry, “what if my computer died on me?”
February 4th, 2007 at 4:24 am
There is an excellent website for online backup information, news and articles. Check it out here:
http://www.BackupReview.info
This site lists more than 400 online backup companies and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.
February 4th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Thanks for the comment and link Jenny. Any personal recommendations or preferences in the world of online backup?
February 9th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Nobody will want to see their computer up in flames or data in it irretrievably lost. The better alternative is to install an online backup application like IBackup and perform regular backups.
Nowadays, everybody from the lonely geek to SMBs have adopted IBackup as the stairway to data safety. Besides safe and efficient backups, IBackup high-level encryption for data even at the data centers ensures that the integrity of their user data is not compromised. IBackup comes with an extremely simple user-intuitive interface that makes it easy for novices to perform backups and restores. It also supports Unicode, provides an extremely convenient web-based interface for consumers and supports advanced client utilities to help manage consumer data.
Install IBackup for Windows to backup and restore all your important files and folders. You can backup and restore using the mirror and relative path options with the former allowing users to maintain the absolute path of the source file. Restoring data backed up in your online backup account is very easy. You can even restore from the Snapshots of files maintained in your IBackup account. You can consider Snapshots as something that allows you to retain changed data history for a period of time.
You can play your favorite audio or video files stored in your IBackup account using the Media Gallery feature in the browser-based application Web-Manager. Media Gallery displays all the video and audio files you have in your IBackup account. Clicking on the video/audio thumbnails will start playing the file using the media player. Securely store your photos and access them from anywhere. Then view them as thumbnails or as an animated slide show using the Media Gallery.
Share files by creating sharable links and emailing these links to your friends, colleagues and collaborators.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the review of IBackup. I have to ask, though, how it may be a better alternative to Carbonite? IBackup is starting at double the price for only 5GB of space. I’m up to 17 gigs of backup right now, which IBackup would be charging me $500 a year … 10 times the cost of Carbonite.
With any online storage, security is an issue. Carbonite is utilizing Blowfish at 1024bit encryption. Any comment as to how that compares with IBackup’s 256bit AES encryption?
February 15th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Look before you leap!
Online Backup Smackdown
Carbonite vs. SystemSafe
Here it is…
The Backup Smackdown! (click)
March 7th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Scott that comparison is inaccurate. Search around a bit on Carbonite.
You are not tied to a contract, you can backup any file you want. By default it will not do executables as most need to be installed to function properly but you can flag specific ones to back up anyway. 500MB per day transfer limitation is not accurate. I got my 22 gig backed up in about 4-5 days. It is Blowfish but it’s 1024 bit. I’m assuming that’s a newer version. There is basic monitoring and notifications. They have more than one facility with your data mirrored at more than one location so if they have a disaster you are still protected.