kahunaburger

A few months ago I grew tired of constantly mirroring my local non-work hard-disks to other disks in the house. My backup solution consisted of multiple copies of the same data on different disks in my home. On a regular basis I would run tools like rsync or robocopy to mirror contents from my main hard-disks to other disks.

For work-related stuff I am subscribed to an online backup solution that would automatically send files compressed and encrypted from my hard-disks to a data-center somewhere in the cloud.

I decided it was time to also have an online backup solution for my private files. I signed up with Carbonite and purchased a two-year subscription at $89.95 (that translates to $3.75 every month). After installing the Carbonite backup client I selected the files and folders that I wanted to have monitored and backed up. The initial backup took 16 days!!! Since then Carbonite has been monitoring my changed, added files and automatically backs them up without any manual intervention. The application is small and unintrusive and I have not had any problems with it since I installed it.

This morning Elan called and told me that I delivered a wrong file for one of the jewelry shots that’s supposed to appear in a magazine soon. I went back to my source files and discovered that I had cleaned up too much and that the file in question was missing from my local hard-disk. Ouch!

I used Carbonite’s Restore option to find the missing files on the backup-server and within minutes I had the files back on my hard-disk. I actually also had copies on one of my rsync/robocopy disks, but I wanted to test the Restore option of Carbonite in this case.

If you’re not doing online backups yet, I suggest you start looking into it right away. $3.75/month is nothing compared to losing invaluable files …

Oh and if you are on MacOS, I have heard good things about Mozy as well.