As personal computers become more powerful and their storage space grows, they have moved into more and more domains of people’s lives. This has led to more and more types of information being stored on them. Initially limited to documents and record, in many cases they also contain books, music, and pictures. In not too much time they may also be holding movies. The impact of potentially losing all of this stuff becomes bigger and bigger. There are many methods of backing this data up, but most users either never back up or do it infrequently. Carbonite reviews provides an economical backup solution that is more likely to be used since it is fully automatic.
Carbonite’s backup system runs on the web. The concept is quite simple. When new subscribers install the service, a client program starts running on the computer that will be backed up. It will run on current Macintosh computers and on other computers running current or recent versions of Windows. This program determines which files to backup and sends them to Carbonite’s backup servers at their operations center. The data is encrypted before going onto the Internet. At the center the backed up data is domiciled on RAID 6 arrays of hard drives. These can recover from the failure of one or two drives.
This service is not intended to back up all of the files on a computer, just the ones that contain content generated by the user. The backup client determines the files to be backed up, but the user can alter the list generated by the client. The user can add or delete directories or individual files from the list.
The backup process starts by backing up all of the files selected in the step above. After finishing, the client periodically looks for changes to any of these files. There is a continuous, automatic process to backup changed files and new files added to the backed up directories.
Files can only be backed up when the system is connected to the Internet. This backup method works well with high speed connections but may be problematic with dialup depending on the amount of data to be transferred. If the user has a connection service with upload limits, as is often the case with satellite or cellular services, it is possible that Carbonite could cause those limits to be exceeded. The encryption applied to the data before sending it is sufficiently robust as to allay security concerns.
Restoring files is pretty straightforward. Restore requests are made to the web site. Either all or selected files will be sent to the requesting computer. All required directory structures will be automatically created. Remote access is a related service. It can be used to copy selected files to any computer that the user logs in from, even if it does not have Carbonite installed.
Here are three reasons for thinking about using Carbonite. The first and main one is that the backup process becomes automatic. The best backup method is no good if it is not used. Moderately inconvenient computer problems can become disasters if no current backup exists. The second reason is that the cost of backing up any amount of data on one computer is quite moderate. Thirdly, there is no need for more hardware, assuming that an Internet connection is in place.
Anyone with valuable data on a computer should consider using Carbonite. It is reliable and easy to use. Most importantly, the online backup reviews is automatic once it is installed.
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