Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 20 March 2008 01:57
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
At this stage, Carbonite only offers to backup data on your computer’s hard drives, and won’t currently backup data stored on external USB or Firewire hard drives – unless you copy it to your computer’s main hard drive first, although Carbonite are looking to improve this in the future.
Carbonite also doesn’t work as an archiving service – if you delete something from your hard drive, it will be deleted from the Carbonite service within 30 days.
That said, Carbonite does offering a versioning facility, meaning if you have just overwritten a file, you can go back to Carbonite to retrieve the older version – especially handy if you’re still on Windows XP, although with Vista’s Volume Shadow Copy service, it’s less useful.
The Carbonite software has been upgraded to version 3.5 and offers a simple wizard to help you set up the software for the first time and select which files are set to be backed up to the Carbonite service.
Installing the software only took a few minutes, asking me various security questions to authenticate me in the future if I ever forget my password, and then asked if I wanted to let Carbonite backup all the data it thinks should be backed up.
Because I’m running a test of the software, I only got it to upload my Documents folder, and once the installation process was complete, I was asked to restart my computer.
That I did, and then noticed a yellow ‘Carbonite’ lock icon in my system tray (on the bottom right hand side of the screen next to the Windows time display). Clicking on this icon takes you to the options screen, where you can see the progress of files being backed up online.
If you haven’t selected any files to backup, as I did, you can right click on any file or folder, then go to the Carbonite menu and click ‘back this up’ – although you can also tell the system NOT to backup files of a certain type, too. Once all your data has been backed up, however quickly or slowly this takes, the Carbonite icon changes from yellow to green.
So, what else is there to know about Carbonite? Please read onto page 3.
