Carbonite online backup seems to be a good way to back up your documents online. Here’s what I like about it. The main thing is that it is very simple and intuitive. You pretty much just install it and forget about it. If you are afraid of losing your documents due to a hard drive failure, this is a great way to protect them. I recommend that you have a backup hard drive that you attach to your computer and then you use Carbonite to provide an “offisite” backup, in case of a fire, theft or some other event that would cause you to lose both your computer and your “onsite” backup. The best backups are double backups. Carbonite is not something that is practical for large amounts of video or audio files. For instance, if you are a video editor and you are editing hours of digital video, there is really no way that online backup is going to work for you to backup all the footage. It would take to long to back up and too long to restore, should something happen. You could save the main project files though, and that might be really important for you. If you are a professional person with a lot of documents, I would say Carbonite is definitely the way to go. After you install the program and allow it to set up the default setting, which backs up the common places where you keep documents on your computer, then you can also choose files to back up on the fly by right-clicking on them (or control+click on the Mac) and adding them to your backup. Another thing I like about Carbonite is that it works on both the Mac and PC, and it’s just one fee, regardless of how much data you need to backup. The initial backup will take some time (usually about a day for a few gigs), but once it’s backed up, then it will just backup changes and you probably won’t even notice it.
One more thing, in case you run into this installation problem:
Here is one problem that I had with a Vista computer. I installed Carbonite and the program display told me it was unable to connect to the internet (it uses a modified browser window to display a lot of its information). It told me it was unable to display the web page. It took me a while to find this, mainly because I got sidetracked thinking it was a firewall issue, and that’s why I’m putting it here. Here is the fix from Carbonite:
“Beginning on roughly March 9, 2009, some customers experienced a change in the Windows HOSTS file, which resulted in network connectivity issues. Many users affected by this problem could not install or update software. Microsoft has provided instructions for repairing the HOSTS file. We have included those instructions here as a courtesy. For more information, please follow the link below to visit Microsoft’s article regarding this issue. To repair the HOSTS file within Windows Vista:
1. Click the Start button.
2. In the /Open/ field, type cmd and then right-click the icon at the top of the list (entitled “cmd.exe”) and select Run as Administrator. This will open a command-prompt window. You may have to press Continue or Allow on a pop-up if prompted.
3. Within the command-prompt window, type Notepad C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and then press Enter.
4. Delete all text in the HOSTS file. 5. On the first line of the HOSTS file, type: 127.0.0.1 localhost (At this point the HOSTS file should only contain this single line of text.)
6. Select* File; Save*.
7. Close Notepad.
8. Restart your computer. For more information, please review Microsoft’s article about this issue at http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Entry.aspx?name=SettingsModifier%3aWin32%2fPossibleHostsFileHijack&threatid=1758608427027806866
