After losing about 500 words of my novel due to a complicated situation involving FTP backups, I began looking for a different way to have an offsite backup of my important files.
I have a portable hard drive in a safe deposit box at my bank, but that’s a rather awkward way of maintaining a backup.
An insurance agent who was training me on how to run an office introduced me to Carbonite. After you install Carbonite on your computer, it automatically backs up your important files to Carbonite’s servers. It takes a while for the initial backup (about 18 days in my case), but once that’s done it only has to backup your new or changed files, which it usually does within minutes after you save them.
That means in the case of a catastrophe, such as a fire, which destroyed my computer, all my writing, all my photos and scanned documents, and all my music files could be restored.
Carbonite costs $49.95 per year for unlimited storage, and I think my peace of mind is worth it. You can check it out here.
The reason I’m blogging this now is that my brother Michael asked about it, since he just had a computer catastrophe. (Hopefully it’s just the motherboard on his computer, so his data may still be safe on his hard drive.)