Chances are, within your lifetime, you will have a hard drive crash or get a virus that corrupts your computer. Case in point: I had some weird attack on my laptop a few months back and it crippled my computer. I thankfully backed up my client files and important information to my external drive (I have this set to do nightly . . . whew), so after a good while of restoring, I was back in action.
I always planned on going the online backup route, but all the free (you know what I’m talking about!) services capped at around 25 gigabytes of storage. I have 100’s of gigabytes to deal with, so I figured I’d just stay with my double nightly backup (one to external, then that backs up to my desktop).
However, Thursday I needed a file that I saved on my machine the wrong way and my external file listing was freaky (didn’t show ANY files). After a reboot, I found the files, but this got me nervous.
So, now I’m trying out www.carbonite.com. They allow you to backup an unlimited amount of data for just over $50 per year . . . I figured it’d be worth it if it worked well. I started the service on Friday. I’m almost half way uploaded at this point, but once the files are backed up, each time you save something, it will upload it to the backup server. Now, that’s just cool.
I can access the backed up files from anywhere a browser is handy. So, now I have the peace of mind that all my important information is away from the house (in case of fire, disaster, etc.).
I’ll post a follow up after a while of use, but I think it’s going to be an obvious business expense issue. If you want to try it, enter the code “tnt” for 2 months free. There are other free versions (and I say go for it if you don’t need the space), but if you have lots of data (I’ll upload all my photos next!), this is almost a no brainer!
Update: It’s August 9th and my 100 GBytes isn’t done yet . . . whew. Otherwise, it runs pretty low key in the background. I can pause for an hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, etc. to get some work done. Nice feature.
