I am a backup fiend, and incurably paranoid. I ghost my hard drive once every month, and have three images of it: one on a portable hard drive in our barn; one on a portable hard drive in my fireproof safe in the house; and one on the second drive of my computer. In between times, I made dvd backups of recent data additions, usually about once a week.
And yesterday I plopped down $50 for a year of Carbonite, and online backup service. Unlimited storage space and very simple. You tell it what folders to back up, and it does it, and when things change, it backs that up. Automatically. You have a folder you want added to the backups, you right-click it and select “Carbonite” from the context menu and tell it to add that folder to the backups.

What is the catch, you ask??? Only one!! The initial backup, for me at least, will take about 10 days!! That’s right campers. I have about 42 gb of data to be backed up, and it has been going for 24 hours now and has done 6%!!!!! The backup rate is partially based on how much I am using the internet. For example, tomorrow and Saturday, when I am at work, it will get more done. I hope.

The good news is that when the initial back up is done, the incremental ones will not take nearly as long.

Anyway, I hope this is definitely worth the $4 bucks a month or so it is costing me.