I get quite a few e-mails from them with suggested products and most of the time their suggestions are very relevant. Over Xmas, after buying a Wii as a present for the family I received lots of e-mails with suggestions of games and accessories. I often get e-mails with cyling equipment, GPS devices, Apple products and software. I can understand this, if I look at certain products then Amazon have that info, can see what I’ve bought or looked at in the past and can offer suggestions of products I may be interested in. Much better than sending me a list of random products I have no interest in.

Sometimes though I get suggestions of things that makes me think they could be stalking me! I’ve been having a few issues with a new hard drive. I think the firewire port or cable is a little dodgy and it therefore disconnects itself. I’ve done nothing about it yet (other than fiddle with cables), I certainly haven’t looked online for a new one, but today I received an email from Amazon with a list of Hard Drives for under £100. I’m sure it was just a coincidence, but maybe they are stalking me!

Onsite Backups

I’m a bit paranoid and go over the top with backups, but you can never be too careful. I have several onsite backups on external firewire drives attached to my computer. These are automatic backups performed by SuperDuper! These are cloned, bootable copies of my entire hard drive, the idea being that should my internal hard drive fail whilst in the middle of a critical project I should be able to simply reboot from one of the external backups and be up and running in a matter of minutes.

I usually have such an automatic backup set to run once a day, another to run once a week and one that I run manually when I feel like doing it. The reason for the latter is that I can keep a clean copy of my hard drive in a state that I know is stable and working. This protects me should my daily backup run before I notice a problem meaning that the daily backup has backed up the problem.

Offsite Backups

I also had another Hard Drive that I used to occasionally back up to and store offsite at a friends house. Offsite backups are essential as storing your backups in the same location as your computer could spell disaster should something terrible such as fire or theft occur. My make-shift solution worked but it wasn’t ideal and I didn’t do the back up often enough. An automated solution was needed.

This is where Carbonite comes in. It is an automated offsite backup solution that installs on your computer and backs up to servers in the cloud. I’d heard plenty of good things about it. It is reliable, secure and transparent. Once set up it just gets on with the process in the background without interfering with your work and keeps a copy of all your important documents offsite.

Carbonite

I’ve only just started using it and haven’t backed up everything yet so this is just a preliminary review. I signed up for a free demo account at http://www.carbonite.co.uk/ I downloaded a small file and installed it. This is a Preference Pane and a menu item. Once you open the Preference Pane you can either let Carbonite automatically back up your files, or you can customise it so that it backs up the files you choose.

Initial Upload

I went for the customise option as I wanted to reduce the number of files so that the initial back up wasn’t too painful.

This is the main issue with any over-the-internet back up solution. Uploads speeds are generally pretty slow, especially so here in the middle of nowhere. With this in mind I only asked it to back up my Documents folder and my Library Folder. Larger folders such as my Pictures, Movies and Music folders were left for now. With these two selected though it was still an 8GB upload. Not a problem as there is no limit on the storage space with Carbonite, but so far its been going for 24 hours and 2GB of data has been uploaded. The initial back up will therefore take 4 whole days to complete. If I want to back up all of my photos, music and movies then that will add another 70Gb of data or 35 days worth of non-stop uploading! Maybe I’ll leave that for a while.

Of course, once the initial upload is completed then the incremental uploads that happen in the back ground only upload changed files so these should be much quicker. All of this happens in the background and there is a setting to give Carbonite lower priority so that the upload process doesn’t interfere with your day to day activities.

Not everything included

I have noticed one problem. By default Carbonite doesn’t backup system files and such like. This makes sense as you wouldn’t want EVERYTHING on your hard drive stored in the cloud. However, if you customise what you do want backed up there are still some restrictions. As a web developer I run an Apache web-server on my Mac and therefore store files for websites that I work on locally within the Apache Web-Server directory. This allows me to store the working files on my computer but also run them as websites so that I can test them before uploading them to the internet.

As I’m constantly working on these files I do of course want to make back-ups of them, but the Carbonite preference pane won’t let me select anything for backup outside of the ‘Users’ or ‘Applications’ directory. My website files are in the Apache directory so can’t be selected. If I move them out of that directory they won’t work properly as websites for testing purposes. If I leave them there I can’t use Carbonite to back them up to the cloud.

Restore

Backing up is only the first step. If you can’t restore files from that backup then it isn’t much use. Carbonite is really easy to use in this respect. Open the Carbonite Preference Pane, click on the ‘Restore’ tab and then you can either restore everything or browse though the individual files and restore them one by one. You can even choose to restore the files to a different location on your hard drive if you wish. This is how I tested it and the files were restored perfectly.

If your computer crashes or is stolen, you can recover lost files to a new computer by visiting the Carbonite website. Recovering small amounts of data (a few files here or there) will probably take only seconds or minutes. Restoring all of your data will take a few days, but I guess that’s a small price to pay and much better than complete loss of all your data.

Carbonite costs $54.95 a year, and I think I’ll be paying that for the peace of mind of having an offsite backup. I’ll just have to work out a way around the issue with backing up files in the Apache web-server directory.