Computer Backup

Computer Backup was Originally Posted on November 9, 2012 by lavarock

I have a 3 year subscription to Carbonite that is pretty useless. They allow you to back up your computer to the “cloud” but there are major problems with the procedure.

They don’t back up movies, only short videos that might be your vacation, etc. They don’t back up certain directories and the biggest problem, they don’t back up the operating system or your executable files! Thus on my system, I will end up with perhaps 100 programs that I will have to reinstall, if I even have the program install disks. They do appear to restore old data and configurations for these programs but that is useless without the current version of the program.

They say that they don’t want to overwrite newer EXE files with older ones, but they are supposed to be saving any changed files to the cloud. Thus if you install a new version of a program, the new files should overwrite the ones on their backup. If the backup doesn’t catch them quick enough before your system died, at least there would only be a couple programs recently installed that would not work. Compare that to all the other stuff that has been on your system for years that now stops working!

There are other solutions out there that are much better, and you would be better off to just buy a second disk (for less than Carbonite’s cost) and create your own cloud. You can get a 2 tb disk at somewhere like COSTCO which will sit on your network; you don’t even have to open the computer to add it. Just assign it a drive letter like “Z” and in explorer (enable all hidden files to show, etc) then just drag the whole “C” drive to “Z” and there you go.

I knew Carbonite had issues from reading some reviews but did not realize how much of a month would be involved trying to recover a computer with their software.

I used to back up hundreds of mainframes and PCs and Servers, so I know a bit about backups. This procedure sucks big time.

They got my money, but never again. You can make your own decision.