Off-site backups are important to me. Local back ups are nice, but how would you recover your files if a thief or a fire took both your source file system and your back up? Until recently, I used rsync-over-ssh to back up my PC's files to my server, which is hosted at a friend's ISP.
Automating the backup is difficult. It is technically easy to automate the backup, but exactly when should the backup take place? rsync takes too long to scan the file system, so it's something I want to schedule when I'm not using the PC. It's a laptop, though, so it's usually powered off at night. And what if I accidentally delete a file I just created, but hasn't been backed up yet?
A friend who recently started working for Carbonite (that's an affiliate link) turned me on to their new off-site backup service for Windows. The service monitors your file system, looking for file modifications. When a file changes, Carbonite enqueues the file on its list of files to back up. Within a reasonably short amount of time, it sends each file on the list to a remote storage site.
You are allowed to backup an unlimited amount of data on one PC, and Carbonite keeps exactly one backup of each file. It would be nice if Carbonite kept versioned backups, but the price—about $4 per month if you pay for 12 months in advance—makes Carbonite a bargain for what you get.
Update 2008-01-02: See Try Mozy, get a free beverage for my current thoughts on Carbonite.
1 comments:
You might want to try Mozy, as well.
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