So far so good
Written: Oct 04 '09
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I recently had a hard drive fail at work and was able to restore all my data files from an external hard drive that I mirror to every week. I do the same thing at home (mirror to an external hard drive) but then after a lightning strike took out our router and my son's computer, I started to think about offsite storage. If the house burned down it really wouldn't do any good to have a melted external hard drive.
I did some digging and I settled on Carbonite online backup. For about $60 per year you can backup with no storage limit.
One thing to keep in mind is that most high speed broadband has much slower upload (your computer to the internet) than download (internet to your computer). We have about 7-10 Mbs download but only ~500kbs upload. There are a few websites that will test your speeds for free and I would highly recommend doing some testing to get a feel for how long the initial backup will take (http://www.speedtest.net/ is a good one). Also keep in mind that you only need to backup your data (usually) and not the program files like Office or Windows. For some people this might not be too much data, for us it is over 50 Gb for just the pictures!
The initial Carbonite setup was pretty easy. You can sign up for a free trial which gives you 15 days to play with it, and you don't have to enter a credit card. The program runs on your computer and initially offers to backup your "My Documents" folder (which is where most people store their stuff). I have all our data on a separate Data drive so I selected the Pictures folder and then right clicked and there is now an option to backup this folder. Carbonite spent a minute looking at everything and then the status icon in the taskbar changed to let me know that Carbonite was backing up the data. If you click on the status icon you get a small window that tells you the status in both amount (Gb) and percent backed up. Well, after a week with the computer on all the time (if it goes to sleep the backup stops) it should finish tonight! As I have added more files and folders Carbonite "knows" to backup these files also. I believe that it watches the folders/files and then about once a day is synchronizes everything. So if I delete something from a watched folder I have about a day to get it back from Carbonite before it follows my deletion. Of course if the drive dies that I think (hope) it will be smart enough to keep everything.
Apparently the earlier Carbonite software was a bit cryptic on how you restored your data but the latest software allows you to actually browse your files online in a directory tree window. This is incredibly cool! Now you can use this service as cloud storage and get files anywhere. I have tested it at different locations and it seems to be working fine. There is a bit of a delay as it builds the directory but everything is there. I think this fundamentally changes how I will use this service.
One thing I don't like is that Carbonite will not backup movie files by default. I understand that it was a choice to limit the size (and time) for people's backup, especially if they have Media Center systems and have a lot of recorded TV. I take a lot of quick movies with our point-and-shoot camera (see my Sony T7 review) and I have to manually select every movie file for backup, even though the directory the movies are in is "watched". I have learned to just search the folder for all video files then select them and then right click "backup these files" and then Carbonite will back them up. I just wish I could dig into an option and tell it to backup everything. So the service is not perfect but it is meeting my need.
I'll update the review after I restore some files as a test.
Bradman
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Bradman
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Brad W
Location: OH
Reviews written: 125
Trusted by: 7 members
About Me:
Cars, computers, digital photography and video.
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