Like many small businesses, the president of is also the director of IT, the procurement manager, finance and accounting, sales and (most importantly) the catering manager.
As director of IT, I developed a backup and recovery strategy to keep off-site backups of current projects and do a full backup periodically to CDs, also kept in another location. Like many businesses, performing backups seems to rank slightly ahead of going to the dentist in the list of My Favourite Things.
But recent telecom outages and watching friends and family go through the pain of crashed computers and iPods have recently made me rearrange my priorities; much the same as the need for a root canal may finally get you to start flossing, or the way people get a home security system after their neighbour’s home gets broken into.
Some ISPs offer automated services – but many of them are size dependent. I have 32GB of material that I want backed up. One of the Canadian telcos charges $6 per month for the first 3GB and $4 for the next block of 3GB – that gets to be pretty pricey. On the other hand, I have now started using a service called Carbonite, that offiers unlimited backup storage capabilities for an annual fee of $50 (US).
The service operates in the background and as the Red Herring review says, it really is idiot-proof. Once installed, Carbonite appears as any other drive on the My Computer view. Carbonite’s default settings take care of backing up My Documents and the Desktop, but it is simple to add other files and folders. Files that are waiting to be backed up have a yellow flag; backed up files are tagged green. It took about a week for it to do the initial 32GB back-up, but it is handling day-to-day changes with ease.
This is a winner for personal and small businesses. Take a free Test drive by clicking on the link.
The question I have is why all ISPs don’t offer these kinds of solutions.