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Carbonite Online Backup

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allen:
I've to date walked the frayed tight rope of PC using without any form of backup (save for a handful of things on USB pen drives).  It's bit me on the ass a few times--twice I've lost literally everything.  So I'm finally looking at taking the plunge and backing things up.  Despite it being an obvious necessity that would have saved me a lot of heartache, I've never really been compelled to bother with it.  I hate the idea of a local backup--whether an external drive or another form of media, it's yet another "thing" I have to worry about--and another thing that can fail. Or be stepped on. Or eaten by the dog.

After a voluntary (unpaid) raving over it by Gregg Stebben on the radio, I've decided to install a trial of Carbonite.  It's fifty bucks a year, paid annually, for unlimited use.  What I'm wondering is if anyone here has any personal experience with Carbonite--any catastrophic issues or great experiences.

So far, I've no complaints... it appears to be backing things up. Presumably somewhere in the Internet cloud where I can retrieve it if necessary. . . but until it becomes necessary to restore from backup, what do I know? :)

sri:
Syncplicity is free, at least as of now.

Also, take a look at Mozy.

allen:
Syncplicity is free, at least as of now.

Also, take a look at Mozy.
-sri (April 19, 2008, 09:38 PM)
--- End quote ---

I was wondering if anyone here had any personal experience with Carbonite specifically, though personal experiences with other comparable services would also be valuable.  Have you used any of these services, or are you just aware of them? I mean, I can do a google search for online backup--I did prior to deciding I was leaning toward Carbonite.

Mozy: among other things, I prefer Carbonites pricing scheme. 
Syncplicity: I want to backup my data and forget it; I don't want to (a) use a new beta for that (b) get locked in with a product before I know its pricing scheme.  More worry some, I've read a few recent stories that cited the CEO expecting the pricing to be in the 20$/mo range. Finally,  am very turned off by its emphasis on data sharing and integrating with facebook, etc.  Judging by the price and services, it's targeting data sharing and syncronizing more than straight up backing up.  I'm far more comfortable with a backup service that just sticks with backing up. Less is more when it comes to set and forget.

cmpm:
I just started using Syncplicity and it works fine.
It monitors the folders and files I tell it too and syncs as they change.

Though I believe a local backup is better and certainly faster.
I have a scheduled sync job every 4 hours to my slave drive.
And I'm considering syncing two computer's slave drives together either through My Network or Syncplicity or both.

Having more then one backup is really needed.

I store everything I need in My Documents. So all I have to back up or sync is that folder. Keeps it simple, but the folder is getting rather large.

Besides documents with license codes, I store all my downloads in there also. Any word processor backup or pictures are in it too.

We have an 80gb external drive to backup to.
External drives, or someone's server or a slave drive could all go down. So using more then one option is optimal.
I use google's bookmark synchronizer, so I don't need those backed up. And online email so that doesn't need backed up either.

Used to I never needed to backup much till I found DC.
Now I have a ton of programs that would take quite a while to download.
Plus it's nice to have older programs that went to paid versions or don't exist that I liked.
I still have some old programs from '94 and up that I like to keep.

Here's a Blog Alert I received the other day.

http://www.newwebmag.com/2008/04/16/cloud-file-services-springing-up-everywhere-but-where%E2%80%99s-my-gdrive/

iphigenie:
I'm interested if anyone has experience with any of the new ones which use amazon s3 as their storage.
I tried an open source one, s3drive i think it was called, which just installed a virtual drive on your pc so you could use other software to backup/sync to it, but it caused problems on my machine (i think access to my network drive still is slower since i installed it, and i have uninstalled it. could be in my head). It was beta of course so these things are to be expected.

Anyone use jungledisk or any of the other similar tools?

To clarify I like the idea of an S3 based one because then it is my S3 account, and therefore the data still belongs to me and is under my direct control.
I am a bit wary of the free ones since I think if it is free then i have no right to demand quality or security - I like to pay, have a proper agreement in place which gives me some guarantees and sla (same reason why i would pay for image storage, mail services etc.)

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