Cheers for Carbonite (and Some Vacation Musings): FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-08-08

This week’s guest contributor is Confident Marketer Sue Painter, but first a brief update from Yours Truly.

The Ur-Guru and I have been traveling a lot over the past few weeks. As an incurable geek, I haul my laptop with me on all these trips, and I’ve been bringing Vesta (the Buffalo MiniStation DataVault) with me to make backups on. In fact, Vesta lives in my laptop case, since I don’t really use her when I’m at home.

While we were driving back from the Russian River Valley, the Ur-Guru noticed that his MP3 player was acting up. It insisted that every song was a bad track and wouldn’t play anything. (I considered connecting mine and forcing him to listen to podcasts, but I restrained myself.)

“You could try reformatting it,” I suggested, “but you’d lose all the music.”

He gave me his best “Do I look like an idiot?” stare and said “Who is it I’m marrying again? Did you think I wouldn’t have backups?”

So when we got home, he reformatted the player, copied the music back onto it, and all was well.

Now, on to Sue’s story about Carbonite.

I use and LOVE Carbonite for backup. No horror stories here, just really hated constantly backing up to CD’s which got disorganized and half the time didn’t work. Plus, I never got around to it in any scheduled fashion. Somehow I ran across an e-ad for Carbonite, checked it out, did a 30 day trial, then bought it. It’s a big, whopping $45 per YEAR and you can back up a second computer for $20 (or at least, that was the deal I was offered). It constantly runs in the background of your computer and gives you 24/7 backup.

Slight downside: it makes my computer run a bit slower, but I solve this by a quick click to put Carbonite on 24 hour pause, do my work, then “unpause” it before I go off to bed. Overnight, it backs anything up I’ve changed that day.

I have had to use it—my Palm Pilot died a horrible death, with all my appointments for the rest of the year, and the backup file on my computer got corrupted, too. Total panic (I am booked nearly a year out with client appointments so my Palm is my lifeblood) but I just clicked on the little icon and got everything restored to my new Palm, no problem.

I clicked on my Carbonite icon and it brought up my entire Palm calendar on the computer screen, same as I would do from my computer files. What I like is that Carbonite is for total non-techies like me—it brings up a screen that looks EXACTLY like your desktop, you click on what you want to restore, and boom, it’s done. Could not be simpler.

Once my calendar was there on my screen (stop, my heart!) I simply hot synced it back to my Palm. I could scarcely believe it was so easy! And yes, give me back floppies—I really hate CDs and can never make them work. (ARG…)

There you have it—another satisfied Carbonite customer. (David Jackson wrote about Carbonite in February 2008.) A backup is useless if you can’t restore your data, so it’s good to hear that it’s easy to get things back, and few professionals can afford to lose their business appointments.

Next week we’ll hear from the Data Doctors.