A little over a year ago, a friend told me about Carbonite – a source she trusted and loved for backing up all her files on the computer.
At the time, we had nothing backing up our computer. This scared me quite a bit, because if our computer ever crashed, we would lose thousands of pictures – not to mention the eBooks and other projects I was working on for the website, financial documents we had saved, and who knows what else.
We took our friend’s advice, and signed up. For $59 per year, this seemed like a very worthwhile and reasonable investment.
Would you believe, that the investment with Carbonite paid off exactly four days later. Out of nowhere, the hard drive on our laptop (which was only one year old) got completely fried. When the “computer guy” who was examining our laptop looked at me and said, “There’s no way I can retrieve any of your information. Your hard drive is gone. I sure hope you have your files backed up somewhere…” I breathed a huge sigh of relief that God had led us to Carbonite just in the knick of time.
And I also wanted to kiss my friend who had told me about it…and maybe could have kissed the Carbonite people if I was in the business of kissing strangers who live in other states, which I’m not, so I just chose to be grateful to them instead.
Anyway.
I just received an email letting me know that everyone who signs up with Carbonite receives a free $20 Amazon Gift Card. (Yay – just in time for Christmas!) This is a great deal, because receiving that card pays you back for a good chunk of your initial yearly investment. Plus, you can get a free 15 day trial to start with to see if you like it. (I’m pretty sure you will like it. We love it because it is super easy to use. Plus, because our files are on Carbonite, I can get online from a different computer and access anything I need to at any time. Love that!)
I encourage you to look into Carbonite and take advantage of this offer. It may save your neck! Or at least it will save all the information stored on your computer that you don’t want to lose!
P.S. If you sign up with Carbonite’s Refer a Friend program, you can help your family and friends back up their computer too – and you’ll both receive Amazon gift cards. I’m using my Refer a Friend links in this post, because I like Amazon gift cards too! But I love how Carbonite saved my pictures and hard work even more, so that’s why I’m sharing this with you. :)
Dropbox, Skydrive, SugarSync, Google Drive
Free alternatives that work just as well or better.
I’m not sure about some of those, but my understanding is that Dropbox only backs up the files you manually put into it for free. I don’t have that kind of time. Carbonite backs up my ENTIRE computer and each time I update or tweak anything in ANY file on my computer, it saves automatically to Carbonite. I love it!
I cannot praise Carbonite enough!! I had a similar story, came out one morning and everything was completely gone, I’m not sure why. I had 2 icons left on my desktop, one of which was Carbonite. I clicked on it to reload computer and it said it could take 2-3 days, which sounded reasonable since I had over 15000 pictures saved. Fifteen minutes later a box popped up and said “restore is complete”. My entire computer was back 100%!!!! I will never be without it, what a peace of mind to not have to think about it, although I do have my pictures backed up at another on-line photo site, too. Also, it’s cheaper if you buy more than 1 year at a time, I believe I paid $139 for 3 years.
This happened to us this past week….only just before we found out about Carbonite. Now a hard drive expert has our drive and it will cost us between 450-2400 dollars to maybe get our data back…and it may be gone forever. It is a year’s worth of pictures and several of videos of our only child. I have cried all week. We got Carbonite the other day and an external drive and Carbonite is 80% done backing up the few files we have now and it AutoMATICALLY is making a mirror of our computer on the 2TB hard drive we bought. So, this will never happen again! The heartbreak of it has been like grief of someone dying to me. I know that does not sound Christian and kind of a little ridiculous. But the grief has been great for me…a photographer and mother to a potentially always only child (maybe not…God is great and can do the impossible). So, anyway, GET CARBONITE!!!! :)
Ugh, Candice – I’m so sorry to hear this happened. Your grief makes sense to me, don’t kick yourself for feeling that way. :(
I started training for a 5k only to be plagued w/shinsplits. My shins are healing, and I ran a mile on Thurs and no pain in shins! I will run a 5k!
I started training for a 5k only to be plagued w/shinsplits. My shins are healing, and I ran a mile on Thurs and no pain in shins! I will run a 5k!
This is good if you don’t care about privacy…if you do just buy an external hard drive, and backup your data.
Hmm, I don’t have any privacy concerns using Carbonite. And while an external hard drive would work, if anything happened to my house, I would lose that too. Plus, I love the fact that now that Carbonite is backing up our whole computer, I never have to think about backing anything up myself. Carbonite does it for me all day long! (I love not having to think…) :)