If it’s good enough for Rush Limbaugh…
…it’s probably good enough for me.
I hear ads for this every day on the radio, so I did some browsing to see what it was all about. Now that my computer is my source of income, I really can’t afford to call up a new-ish client and say “Oops, everything got deleted - can I have another two weeks to get that done for you?” I’m figuring $50 a year to recover everything really isn’t so bad, right? I mean, I’m on a PC running Vista - god only knows what could happen!
It’s kinda like insurance - you hope you never need it, but you pay for it because when the day comes, you don’t want to be without it. I’m signing up for my 30 day free trial. I hope I never need to use it!
Keep in mind online backups do not backup OS files, just your personal user files. So if you lose your harddrive altogether, you want to have a full harddrive ‘image’ backup so if you need to replace your bad harddrive, you will need to reload ALL original system/drive files to the new drive via the PC’s DVD drive.
Dell likely provides a disk backup utility program to backup an ‘image’
of your harddrive on DVD-R(read only and cheap) or DVD-R/W(read and write reusable and expensive). This will normally take 2 to 4 DVDs and about 30 minutes. Do not use CD-R or CD-R/W disks since they do not hold enough data and take way to long on way too many disks, although they can be used too.
If you have an online backup service, you should only need to backup an image of your harddrive about every 6 months, or whenever you have loaded new software application(s) that would not be easily done again on a new harddrive. Your online service will recover all your ‘personal’ files to a new harddrive or new PC.
Hope this helps you understand online backup limitations. They are for your personal files and preferences, not OS and Program files.
Comment by Jim R — October 29, 2008 @ 2:35 am
Oh, and FYI, you can use Vista’s Start/Program/Accessories/SystemTools/Backup and Status utility to do what an online backup does, excepting you do it locally using a DVD R/W disk. It can be set to Automatically backup your personal files locally, but not likely as easy and transparent as an online service.
Comment by Jim R — October 29, 2008 @ 2:43 am
[...] know that Carbonite Backup thingy I ordered a few weeks ago? Thank God (and Rush Limbaugh) that I did. No, I haven’t had a problem yet, but the laptop [...]
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