Prevent Catastrophe - Invest In Carbonite

As personal computers become more powerful and their storage space grows, they have moved into more and more domains of people's lives. This has led to more and more types of information being stored on them. Initially limited to documents and record, in many cases they also contain books, music, and pictures. In not too much time they may also be holding movies. The impact of potentially losing all of this stuff becomes bigger and bigger. There are many methods of backing this data up, but most users either never back up or do it infrequently. Carbonite provides an economical backup solution that is more likely to be used since it is fully automatic.

Carbonite makes the backup process very simple and automatic. Their service runs on the web. Before a computer is backed up for the first time, a client program is installed on it. There are clients for Macintosh and Windows. They require fairly recent versions of either. This client queues up a list of files to be backed up and sends them one at a time over the Internet to Carbonite's archive server location. They are encrypted before being sent. The archive server keeps theses files on RAID 6 arrays. These are sets of hard drives that can handle one or two units failing without losing any data.

Though it is prudent to backup the entire hard drive from time to time, that is not the purpose of this service. It tries to limit the backup to files with user generated contents. The user can override the decisions made by the client, adding or deleting files or entire directories from the backup list.

At first, all of the selected files need to be backed up. After this, incremental backups need to be done on changed files and any files that are new to the directories in the list. Checking for new and changed files and backing them up is a continuous, automatic process.

The computer has to be online for data to be sent to the archive center. This approach usually has good performance when used with a high speed connection. It may not work as well with a dialup connection unless limited data is to be backed up. Backing up large amounts of data could cause data transfer quotas to be exceeded. This could be a concern with satellite or cellular Internet connections. Since the data is encrypted using a strong method before being sent, security should not be a big concern.

It is easy to restore files. One must log into the web site from the computer to receive the restore. The request can be for all or just selected files. Directories that are not already present will be established. There is a version of restore called remote access. One can use it to retrieve requested files onto a computer that is not running Carbonite.

Here are three reasons for thinking about using Carbonite. The first and main one is that the backup process becomes automatic. The best backup method is no good if it is not used. Moderately inconvenient computer problems can become disasters if no current backup exists. The second reason is that the cost of backing up any amount of data on one computer is quite moderate. Thirdly, there is no need for more hardware, assuming that an Internet connection is in place.

If you have data on a computer that you would really hate to lose, you should think about getting the best online backup available, like that offered by Carbonite. Once you have it installed, you will rarely have to give it any thought. It will keep your backups current and available at anytime and anywhere.