There are two types of computer users in the world - those who backup their data and those who wish they had.

I’d like to think that I belong to the first group rather than the second. But that may be wishful thinking on my part - my ultimate work product is kept in Subversion respositories, but all of the intermediaries only get backed up once a week. And the home laptops only get backed up every month or so.

One of my colleagues at work had a hard drive crash. After hearing that we spent close to two grand on hard disk recovery I thought that I take another look at my backup procedure.

The problem with a laptop is that there isn’t a good way to backup - no second internal drive and usually not connected to a network drive for an automated overnight backup. So the work laptop gets a weekly backup and the home laptops get a backup when I get around to attaching an external USB drive.

Which is why I’m currently about 2 GB into a Carbonite Online Backup trial. Carbonite allows me to securely mirror designated portions of my hard drive to their servers. If it works as advertised, then I’ll have access to a one day old snapshot of my system. Easily worth the $50 annual fee. And if it doesn’t work, then I’ll be posting about one of their competitors in a couple of weeks.

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3 Dec: Online Backup Redux