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Technology news and Jobs 
Fuzzy Logic Want to keep your online backups stored in “Carbonite”?
Fuzzy Logic Want to keep your online backups stored in “Carbonite”? | Want to keep your online backups stored in “Carbonite”? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 20 March 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Carbonite only works when you aren’t actively using the PC – after 5 minutes of no activity with your keyboard or mouse, it starts backing up again, while the system can also be set to run at the lowest priority, so as not to get in the way when you’re doing actual work. Also, because many people have gigabytes of data on their hard drives, if you’re with an ISP such as Telstra, or Optus on selected plans, or on any 3G/3.5G wireless broadband network, uploads are counted towards your download limit, meaning users on low download caps can find themselves quickly ‘shaped’ for the rest of the month or charged excess usage fees. This really isn’t a problem in the US or the UK, where broadband speeds and download limits are much more generous, but with some Australian ISPs doing the wrong thing by their customers, Avalanche have indicated they will advise consumers that the initial transfer of data could be gigabytes in size, and to ensure that any backup they do doesn’t wipe out their download quota for the month. So far, using Carbonite has been exceeding simple, and thanks to the unlimited storage feature, I haven’t need to worry about which files to not backup – something that most competing online backup services force you to do because of (mostly) limited nature, traditionally forcing users to choose the most “important” data to keep online. The Carbonite user interface is a seamless add-on to Windows Explorer. The files and folders you want to back up get a small 'dot' next to them after being selected. When the dot is yellow, the file has not yet been backed up. When the dot turns green, the file has been backed up on Carbonite's servers. The colour scheme matches the Carbonite icon and colour in the system tray. All-in-all, Carbonite’s Online PCBackup in an inexpensive, unlimited and easy way to a backup of your most important data, ready to restore it when you need it again. Carbonite also claim their backup solution also helps anyone wanting to move from Windows XP to Windows Vista, even transferring the right kind of data from XP to Vista, where some of the files and folders such as ‘My Photo’ or something similar having the data moved over to Vista’s new ‘Documents and Settings’ file placement equivalent. So, Carbonite won’t actually store your files in “carbonite”, it is an independent ‘set and forget’ type of product which can happily be used on its own - or even smarter still, as a valuable supplement and online backup to your existing external hard disk backup solution. Available for AUD $59.95 for a one year’s subscription, or AUD $109.95 for two years. Besides the existing XP and Vista version, a Mac version is in development, as is a Linux version. Online backup might not be sexy, but it’s not the backups that are exciting – it’s the restores, and with 200 millionth file restored by Carbonite users this month since May 2006, they must have some pretty excited customers!
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