Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a little paranoid about backups. After nearly losing an entire wedding photo shoot due to a Windows mishap, I will never be the same. That was about 5 years ago. Some call me crazy, but at least I know my data is safe. Well, sort of.
I say "soft of", because at this moment if my house caught fire and burned to the ground, I would be in a sorry state. There would be a LOT of stuff gone. I'm not talking about physical things, but 1's and 0's. Cameras, furniture, computers, toys - those can all be replaced. But the photo of my daughter with purple lip gloss smeared all over her and the bathroom can never be replaced. I took all steps to guard against hardware and software failure (I have RAID 5 setup on one computer and all my photos also stored on an IDE drive in another computer - automatically synchronizing in real time), but I have very little "off-site" storage. If something happened that took out my computers at home (burglary/fire), I'd be crying.
So, how does one protect against the dozens, or even hundreds in my case, of gigabytes of precious data? I'm hoping it is online backup. A service that backs up my data in real time to a server...somewhere. These services have been around for a long time, but only now are they affordable for everyone.
Carbonite is an online backup company. They backup all your precious data on their servers (encrypted of course) and continue to keep that backup up to date from a tiny little app that sits on your desktop. The best part about it is that it is for "unlimited" backup - for $5/mo. (or $50/year)! Whoa!
I am very skeptical, so I am trying it. They have a 15 day trial and I'm going to see if I can get that extended, because by my calculations it should take about 60 days for my data to be backed up. This initial backup takes a LONG time, but the subsequent updates each day will happen much faster. In the last 12 hours I have uploaded 1GB of data - I have 123GB left. Maybe it will speed up, but I doubt it. Carbonite tries to be unnoticed. Their goal is for you to set it up and never have to think about it again. This is great, but I'd like to see a feature that allows me to bump up it's bandwidth priority.
I will continue to post updates about this service as I go. If it really is what it says it is, then I think anyone with a PC and broadband should sign up. $5/mo. is a VERY small price to pay for knowing that your data is secure. Is it the ideal solution for everyone? No, but it's better than doing nothing.
I still have yet to see implemented my idea for remote/online backups...but that's another blog entry.
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