My Favourite backup is Mac Friendly again (^_^)

November 17, 2009 | Posted in • Miscellaneous

Although the guys are Carbonite are great at what they do, they kind of strike me as idot savants of the computer world. OK, here is my reasoning. They come up with a great easy to use back up program. You install it, config a few settings and then walk away. Their program then churns away in the background copying all of your latest files out into cyberspace somewhere.

I was content with the old external hard drive back up, until last year when I was audited. I was all safe and secure thinking. Yep -- I have everything on file, BRINGITON MR TAXMAN!

Well, when I got the letter, after I finished hyperventilating, I fired up my old Mac Mini (which, BTW, is only fired up once a year, before TAX time, just to dump my pile of receipts into an old outdated program that only runs in OS9 - hense the PowerPC Mac Mini. OK that's another Rant -- Where is the decent Mac based accounting software!). Well, my mini, which never really liked me, picked a fine time to pack it in. I know what your thinking... time to idle the old suburban in the garage for a while with the garage doors shut, right! Ha ha! Nope. I back up! Everything that I do - there is a copy. A binary doppelganger (Hey now there is a better name than carbonite, and it is available on godaddy). Duplicate Data! I had a FIrewire Hard drive sitting next to the old Mac Mini. But, never did it occur to me that the place could burn down - or that some perverted thief could find my old mac mini & the shiny (well, OK, dusty) 20 gig firewire hard drive sitting next to it even the remotest bit tempting. Well, it was all safe and secure. Redundancy -- in two places, just in case one died.

One did die.

And so did the other.

All of my tax data. Both at the same time. Or some time in the 9 months that I never touched the two of them.

I'm sure the taxman has never heard "Oh, but I did have all of the info you needed, right here on this computer... but it AND my backup died. How CONVENIENT! (for those of you that remember the 80's -- I'm starting to sound like the church lady here).

We'll to make a long story short -- I managed to use a file recovery program, uncountable pots of coffee, and a long sweaty 24 hours filled with lots of swearing and curled up sobbing in the corner (I'm not kidding here). I finally managed to retrieve the files that I needed.

Now I am here to tell you -- This has truly been a real story! Ask my wife, or better yet, my barber who laughs at the shiny spots on my head and jokes that it is a good thing he does not charge by the pound. One set of backups is not enough. Have one onsite & another offsite. Either an online service (highly recommended, because you set it and forget it), or at least give a hard drive to a buddy. I'll start a list below of all the sites that I can think of below.

Now the reason I think Carbonite. com are Idiot Savants. I updated to Snow Leopard the day it came out & everything worked perfectly. Except when I went to retrieve a file from a Carbonite backup - I accidentally overwritten a file that I needed. Well Carbonite didn't work with Mac 10.6. My bad for installing it in such haste.

But Carbonite could have at least told me when their update was out. They could have at least made a mailing list for those of us that are tax data challenged to sign up for. But no, they just quietly updated their software and said keep checking this web page. Someday we will have an update on here.

They updated either today, or sometime in the last week... I don't know when... They never told anybody.

Here are some links you may fine useful

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