Cheap Backup
Walk into any DickSmith or OfficeWorks and you will most probably see them stacked and ready to go, terabyte drives for under $150. Boy is that cheap. It certainly makes you think about buying one. You could store so many photos in it, videos etc, Great for backup?
But is it really? Yes its cheap, but does it make backing up more secure or easier. No it doesn’t. With growing families and less room for PCs these days, most people keep their hard drive in the desk draw (that is where mine is). And once an a while, they remember that they should backup the latest digital photos they downloaded onto the family PC. Unfortunately once and while, isn’t really good enough when you are talking about important information.
The difference between online backup and buying a terabyte drive, is that online backup will do it for you. There is no “remember to grab the drive, plugging it in, finding the files, dragging them across and then congratulating yourself that you finally got around the backing your PC up”. Carbonite simply does it all for you, every day. It’s automated and that is really what is so great about it.
Some of you might say that online backup can’t be used to backup a terabyte’s worth of data. How would you ever get it back if you had to download it, it would take months. They have a valid point. Carbonite, and online backup in general (at the consumer level anyway) wasn’t designed to backup anything and everything on your PC. Sure it can and will do that if you manage it that way, but for the everyday user, it should be used to provide secure backup of your most important files. Your most important pictures, documents, emails contacts, receipts and invoices etc. For many it will be their only form of backup, for others it will be a secondary source.
If you look at purely from a monetary sense, $150 for a terabyte is equivalent to a 2 year Carbonite subscription. But be sure to also factor in the effort that it has saved on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis when the manual backup is performed. What would you prefer to be doing late at night?
