How to Protect Digital Photos With Carbonite
If Disaster Strikes Your Computer Carbonite Restores Precious Photos
One of the lurking menaces in digital photography is catastrophic hardware failure resulting in the total loss of all the images stored on a computer. Some, but not enough, photographers methodically back up their images on CD or DVDs and have some protection from inevitable hardware failures. There are other more serious dangers in the world, such as fire or flood that may destroy your home, destroying your backup disks along with the computer. Carbonite offers an affordable, reliable, secure, and easy-to-use remote backup service to consumers and small businesses using Windows PCs in more than 80 countries.
David Friend and Jeff Flowers founded Carbonite. The idea for Carbonite came in mid 2005 when Jeff’s wife’s laptop was stolen from her car and she lost two years of irreplaceable baby pictures. The same week, David’s daughter’s hard drive crashed and she lost the college term paper she had been working on for two months.
Storage Capacity
Carbonite promise unlimited file storage in their Boston data center for a reasonable yearly flat fee. They can do this because there are natural inhibitors in the system. Carbonite targets files on the fixed hard disk of a computer and ignores external discs using USB connections. Serious photographers soon fill up the main hard disk with image files and move most to external drives and disks.
Carbonite is not the answer for total off site photo backup, but is a useful extra precautions for those priceless shots. Typically, photographers need to select their best and most important original image files and store them on the main hard disk, allowing Carbonite to back them up. This is not in place of local backup copies on disk but is an extra level of protection.
Carbonite works with Windows Explorer, an application familiar to most users. In the “My Documents” folder, green or yellow dots will appear on the files and folders. A file or folder with a green dot has been successfully backed up. A yellow dot indicates that the file or folder is waiting for backup. Right clicking on any file that is being backed up, users have the option to “Don’t back this up” or can choose “Don’t back up files of this type.” In the example below, right clicking on the Word file and selecting “Don’t back this up” will cause Carbonite to not back up this file. Selecting “Don’t back up files of this type” will cause Carbonite to not back up any Word files.
Restoring a specific file or folder is simple and quick. Access to the remote Carbonite Backup Drive is via “My Computer” or an icon on the desktop. The Carbonite Backup Drive will display everything that backed up to Carbonite’s remote data center. Carbonite keeps its backup copy of deleted files for 30 days, giving time to restore any unwanted deletions.
Installation and Configuration
Downloading Carbonite and getting it running is mostly straightforward, although a couple of minor traps surfaced during the suite101 test on a PC running Vista home Premium.
The download and installation went smoothly until Carbonite attempted to establish communications with Boston to start uploading backup copies. The firewall on the computer prevented it, despite configuring it giving Carbonite permission to send data over the Internet. Temporary disabling of the firewall allowed Carbonite to establish communications with its home base and reactivating the firewall did not bother it.
The installation was set up using a normal user account on Vista rather than as the administrator. So Vista may have been the problem rather than Carbonite.
The Carbonite software offered the option of automatic file selection for the initial backup or only user specified folders and files. On this test, the automatic selection seemed far broader than suggested by Carbonite. It is possible to go override the initial selections and limit the first backup to your most important files, as it takes days, or even weeks to complete the first backup. Once this is done Carbonite is easy to manage, and mostly runs automatically in the background keeping the backups of your important photos current.
