* Storage back up in action
Last week was a mess for me – my laptop and I thought my disk drive had crashed – and I lost about two days of work because of it.
For the past several days, Vista had been operating sporadically – applications locked up or wouldn’t open, Windows Explorer wouldn’t work and performance was slow, slow, slow.
Fortunately, I had installed Carbonite online backup, so I was able to verify that the files I was working on were being backed up. I also checked to see that files had been backed up locally to an external USB drive.
Carbonite costs $49.95 a year and backs up files as they change. The service backs up as much data as you want. It is well worth the investment as I found out last week.
Anyway, on to the story. After I verified that the files I needed had indeed been backed up by Carbonite I ran a low-level disk utility to find that my hard disk was OK. I also ran my virus protection software for the thousandth time to make sure that an errant virus wasn’t affecting my performance.
Then with fingers crossed, I shut down my laptop – I had been reluctant to do this, since I didn’t know if it would restart and I had several deadlines to complete.After shutting down the laptop, I inserted the first of my system recovery disks – consigned to the fact that I might have to re-install applications and data. The system quickly ran the first three disks, and restarted. I entered my password and found that only Microsoft Office 2003 had been clobbered. I reinstalled it, and also found that my data was still there.I can’t say that Carbonite had saved the day for me, but I am definitely glad I had it installed on my system. If you want to find out more about Carbonite’s online backup service, visit its Web site (Compare Data Backup and Replication products)
