Sep
15
Carbonite: Backup for everyone
September 15, 2006
This week Steve Jobs at Apple announced movie downloads from their very popular iTunes service.
Like most people with iPods, I spent days (or maybe weeks) copying my Audio CD’s to my computer. Now I have my entire CD collection on my computer, along with movie’s I’ve downloaded from iTunes, for a total of over 40GB of data. However, unlike the music downloads, you cannot legally burn the movies to DVD for watching on your TV.
But what happens if my computer crashes?
iTunes offers a backup function to CD’s, but backing up 40GB of data will be time consuming and almost as boring as the days I spent copying my Audio CD’s.
I can keep the original CD’s, but that takes up space. And what about the music and movies I purchased from iTunes? All that money spent… is it really gone?
This is just another good reason to backup your data regularly… and I mean all your data. Not just your music and movies… your spreadsheets, Word documents, and everything else on your computer.
Historically, this has not been convenient. For years it has been recommended that you back up your data to CD’s… but that’s when I had a few megabytes of data. Now we’re talking about gigabytes, and a lot of them.
Then came on-line backup services, Xdrive, iBackup, etc, but they’re pretty expensive for the average user. On average it would cost around $50 a month to backup my iTunes library… $600 a year!
Recently, one company rewrote the book on on-line backups. They saw a great opportunity in a market that was unreasonable and took advantage of it.
Carbonite, offers unlimited on-line data backups for $5 a month. This is not a typo. Carbonite backups up all your data… iTunes, My Documents, everything except applications and system files, to it’s secure servers.
This means if your computer crashes or your home is destroyed in a fire or flood, your data is absolutely safe at Carbonite.
Besides the unbelievable low price of $5 a month, Carbonite breaks another rule of current on-line backup services… they keep it simple.
Much like Apple has been successful by creating simple products that work, Carbonite’s backup software is the simplest I’ve every used. Just run the install program and it works. Carbonite will automatically start backing up your data. You can easily choose what folders or files you don’t want to backup, otherwise you can rest assured that your data is safe. Carbonite’s website says that it “Never slows down your computer or Internet”, and I’ve found that to be true.
Just be warned that initially backing up 40 gigs of data took my computer approximately three weeks. But I was able to use my computer all that time and once it was backup up, Carbonite only copied files that were added or changed.
When I first saw this I thought it was too good too be true. Are these guys for real? Can I trust my data with them? However, they went the extra mile and received certification from BBB On-line, and convinced Staples that their service was secure and their business practices honorable. These two little logos (BBB and Staples) on the Carbonite website made me feel better about them… it was a great marketing move.
Carbonite clearly rewrote the rules for on-line backup by offering a simple solution at a very reasonable price. If you cherish your data, music and movies, you now have no excuse for not backing them up.
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