Carbonite.com

[Roff]

Have any of you used Carbonite.com?
Yesterday I accidentally deleted a picture from my C: drive, but I run a nightly automatic incremental backup to a little external Western Digital 80GB drive, so I figured, no problem. I went to copy the picture back onto my C:drive, only to discover that my computer wasn't seeing the WD drive! I fiddled around with the WD power and USB cables, and it started making a clicking noise. I Googled this and found out that it appeared to be the dreaded clicking failure mode.
I let it click for quite a few minutes with the USB cable disconnected, and it finally quieted down. I then reconnected the USB cable. It showed up on Windows Explorer, and I was able to recover the file. Everything else seems to be intact. Maybe it was just rebuilding the FAT or something, but I don't trust it now (it had done a similar thing a few weeks ago).
So, to make a long story even longer, I signed up for a Carbonite trial yesterday. It's free for 3 weeks. If you want to continue using it after that, it's US $50 per year. Four bucks a month seems pretty reasonable if there are no glitches or gotchas. Does anyone have experience with it, good or bad?

How about the WD drive problem?

 

[blueroomelectronics]

Leo Laporte love's it (on his podcasts)

I've never used it.

 

[dknguyen]

WHy wouldn't you just buy more hard drives? It'd take me forever to upload my stuff online, like 1.5TB of stuff and it would completely bog down my internet connection while uploading.

 

[Roff]

WHy wouldn't you just buy more hard drives? It'd take me forever to upload my stuff online, like 1.5TB of stuff and it would completely bog down my internet connection while uploading.

If I had terabytes of stuff, I probably would buy more drives. As I pointed out, my WD drive is only 80GB, and it still has lots of room. Carbonite is working on backing up 19GB, and is about 1/3 done.
For 50 bucks a year, it doesn't seem worth hassling with a replacement drive, which might have the same problem (if it is a problem). That is, unless there are issues with Carbonite.com.

 

[HiTech]

I use a third HDD for important file backup. And my two extra drives aren't Western Digitals - they are Seagates

No way wouyld I pay for on-line storage.

 

[dknguyen]

I use an external HD for my backup that remains unplugged most of the time. I have an internal HD that mirrors it and is more up to date that I work with.

But I've just run out of space and every time I add a new backup drive I also have to add an internal "working" drive to mirror it. Expensive, but the data represents a lot of time invested. I don't want to have 2 external HDs floating around though lol.

 

[Roff]

What do you guys do for backing up in case your house burns down?

 

[dknguyen]

What do you guys do for backing up in case your house burns down?

Bigger fish to fry then. Though I could put it into a fireproof box...not sure how hot it gets inside those boxes during a fire though.

 

[picbits]

What do you guys do for backing up in case your house burns down?

I have a 100mb network link to my workshop which is away from the house so things get backed up between the two premises.

 

[OutToLunch]

we don't have terrabytes of data to back up on the computers at our house, so I simply back up the data on a DVD every so often and make a second copy (even a CD will hold way more than 80gb). I keep one at the house and one at work. If both were to burn down at the same time, that would really suck.

 

[picbits]

(even a CD will hold way more than 80gb).

I wish my CDs would hold that much data

Even my DVDs only hold 4.7Gb

I'm just encoding nearly 500gb worth of recorded programs into XVID format at the moment on the server and that has nearly 1.5Tb of storage......

 

[OutToLunch]

oops - yeah - i must have been thinking 80Mb...

i just know that the data we have fit on the dvd but wouldn't on the cd. i think it was somewhere around 2gb in total. cd's are what - 700Mb?

 

[Roff]

I'm getting lots of replies, which are useful, but William is the only one to address one of my original two questions. I guess that means no one has tried Carbonite, or has experience with Western Digital drives.

 

[tcmtech]

How aboout just stopping by your local computer repair center and asking for a few old drives?
My brother works as a local service tech at a repair center and anything under 40 gig they pull out of a computer durring a rebuild or upgrade goes right in the trash! They are starting to do that with some 80 gigs now too. I have him save them for me. the last time I got a bag of about 15. Most worked!
Size and brand varied alot, 4.3 gig to 80 gig, most were 20 to 40 gig, not bad for the asking! get one of those USB external multi function HDD adapters on ebay for $15, I did.
But now what to do with the 3.8 ter of external space I have acumilated? copy everything I have 10 times over? Perhaps I could Sell dk a ter divided up over 30 plus HDD's?