Jonathan Malek

9 days later, and Carbonite is finally finished. There is a pleasant little green lock in my system tray letting me know all is well:

Carbonite backed up 10,179 files in more 31,494MB over a period of 9 days. A bit too slow for my preferences, but I’ll watch how it does over the beta period. Now that the data is up there, keeping up with the small changes and additions should be relatively quick…right?

I must say though, for peace of mind mixed with instant gratification–and less than 2GB of data–Mozy (the little orange “m” in my tray) is the way to go. A couple of hours, and 2G of data were backed up somewhere other than right here.

I love online calendars. For making sure that the family (all over the US and outside) can plan, that my wife can plan around my commitments, and I around hers–it’s the best. I played around with getting a hosted MS Exchange account (from 1and1.com)–it works great, especially with the JasJar, but it just doesn’t meet that shared calendar thing that you get with Airset, or 30boxes.com, or…now Google.

So I set up my Google calendar, added iCal subscriptions to my 30boxes.com and backpackit.com calendars/events, added a US Holidays list, and stood back to look. It’s a bit buggy (it took several tries over an hour to add the iCal’s, I got various errors in various shapes and sizes), but it sure looks nice–in a simple way.

I’ve been using Outlook 12 for a bit, and I have grown used to the side-by-side calendars–my main calendar, and my iCal imports. But this Google approach–all the calendars on the same view, using colors to indicate the different sources, is really handy.

I get a bunch of “Failed to load details for calendars” it seems on every refresh (or I’d have a screen-shot to paste here)–so there’s still work to do. But here it is, my email, my contacts and my calendar.

72 hours later, and I’m barely passed 12G with Carbonite.com. Just under 20G left to go…

Is Carbonite a realistic solution? Unless your machine is on all the time, and you have a month to spare waiting for your backups to get pushed up to the online storage vaults, I don’t think so. For my wife with her thousands of digital photos on a laptop that’s on only when she works? Definitely not.

Mozy: just under 2G in less than 2 hours. So for the barest of essentials, this is a fast tool. It kicked on when I stepped away for dinner, and was done by the time I got back. Kudos for keeping out of my way.
Carbonite: just under 2G in the last 12 hours, and with 30G more to go, this could be a long, long, long wait. But let’s face it, once it’s all up there…right?

Recently I started looking at options to offline some of my backup data. I backup all my home machines to a single 400GB LinkStation NAS (gigabit!) using SyncBackSE. I keep a weekly rotation of data (full on Sunday, incrementals for the rest of the week) except downloads and music, which are on a monthly backup (full). At the end of any given week, I am up to about 70% used, so there is enough space on that NAS for me to put all our digital photos on a share.

But that’s not enough for me–I want to make sure that if something REALLY bad happens, I can still find the most imporant stuff–taxes, quicken files, code, digital photos. And I’m just too unlikely to follow through with a DVD backup each week, a fireproof safe or a safety deposit box. So I looked around at some of the online backup options out there, and while there are a few that are free, the not-free aren’t exactly cheap. I settled on mozy.com, which gives you 1Gb free, another gigabyte for answering some questions, and has a referral program for adding more (so click on that link…) Having 1 (ONE!) gigabyte is a bit like answering the question that Ricky Gervais once fielded:

“…what three things I would save if my house was on fire. I said my cat, my salamander and oh…one of the twins. Later a journalist asked, ‘How are the twins?’”

While Ricky doesn’t have twins, I have a whole lot more than 1G of REALLY important info. I got to 2G, and trimmed it down to the barest of essentials–then left it alone. A week later, I tried a recover (no backup strategy is worth a fig if you haven’t attempted a recovery, as I once learned), everything worked like a charm. And while Mozy has a 5G option for-pay, I decided I would try other options (I’m keeping Mozy for now, but 5G just ain’t enough for a real backup of my most important data–which runs to just over 30G). During my research phase, I came across Carbonite as an option for handling the 10′s of gigabytes of digital photos that my wife has taken.

Carbonite: unlimited storage, flat fee. Me: woah.

On the home page they mention a PC backup option, coming soon–and today, I got an email invite to join their beta. A quick install, a kill-restart of explorer.exe (reboot? We don’t need no steenkin’ reboot), and wow–I must say a very nice look. Carbonite does image overlays in explorer to let you know which files are being backed up. With a shell extension (does it work in x64?) to select what you want backed up, this was a VERY easy config. The admin tool is a little grandma-ish (click HERE to START!!!), but hey–I guess that’s the target. This is something I could definitely hand off to the parents and in-laws for their backup needs.

Memory usage for both mozy and carbonite seem minimal, I haven’t noticed any negative impact on network performance either (though I have the killer Comcast 6M connection–wouldn’t consider this otherwise). For a beta product, this Carbonite tool seems pretty sharp.

Are there better options out there, short of buying a tape drive and calling Arcus armed security guards for a weekly pickup?