Just another Friday in support

With the working week over and everyone’s backup issues taken care off, I settled in for some light tweeting and preparing for my weekly backup blog post.

On Thursday however, I caught site of a tweet from one of our twitter followers and recent subscribers to Carbonite having a few problems with their PC. It read something like this:

that would be the sound of a completely corrupted hard drive – fortunately I took out a subscription with @CarboniteAU about a month ago

I kept an eye out for progress and it seemed a few people where interested in what the result of the hard drive crash was.

See this tweet:

Have you been happy with @CarboniteAU? Looking to switch from external HD to Cloud.

The exchange continued

let me see how well my data on @CarboniteAU restores to my system – I have not started that process yet

This was all happening yesterday (Friday) in the afternoon.  I contacted the person who was following the events to offer assistance to them should they wish to also trial Carbonite. They were happy to look at it in a week or so.

The day’s events took over and I didn’t hear or see anymore on what was going on with our restore process. However at about 7.50pm it started to get a little tense. The restore had started but being what the internet is in Australia, it wasn’t exactly going full steam ahead (which is what most people expect)

Here is a transcript of what was happening:

Is the @CarboniteAU @Carbonite server down at the moment?

I have reinstalled the @CarboniteAU software – now to try and reinstall my lost file #harddrivecrashedlosteverything

So @CarboniteAU back up has supposedly started – but I can see no evidence of it – gets confusing because flips between AU & US site

OK I found the information about @CarboniteAU restore process 45 535 files to be restored – 4 files restored – things are starting to move

What is fascinating about this is that it is so real and during the day I had tweeted about keeping your backup simple so that you can understand it and then restore it confidently. Our Carbonite customer was confident on the PC and so I was confident that they would work Carbonite out. However you could sense some insecurity.

Then the comments regarding AntiVirus software popped up. The transcript goes like this:

Does AVG cause a problem when restoring ?

At one stage the files restored with updating regularly and now again they seem frozen?

Would guess AVG & any AV sware would scan new files & slow.

Thanks Sonia I think I have managed to turn off AVG but may only be for 15 minutes

AVG Disabled! Thanks

Carbonite has never had any conflicts with AVG anti-virus software. There are some that at the point of installation we do have problems with but not AVG. However removing the need to scan files as they were being restored would have relieved some pressure on the PC. Glad this was resolved.

Now whilst all of this was going on, I was advised (via twitter) of a conversation regarding Carbonite was going on via Whirlpool. You can see parts of it here.

Had to place 3 posts there to ensure untruths where not being said about the product. Carbonite is not for everyone, particularly those with big data requirements (and especially video).

I do my best to never promote via Whirlpool, they think everything is spam for some reason. Anyway, whilst keeping an eye out on what was going on via Twitter I applied myself to whirlpool.

Now that status at 9.34 from out Restore was as follows:

@CarboniteAU 172 files since 8:08pm seems slow moving when I have 45363 files to restore

It seems we might have been keeping a few people entertained.

LOL we are AMISH tonight! only thing happening here on my superfast internet is @Carbonite @CarboniteAU RESTORE

Ok the next check was a little later (11ish),

All is good! The older version of the file I needed for tomorrow has been restored awesome work @CarboniteAU

So we did the important part of our job, which was to get people back to work.

@CarboniteAU no status is unchanged – the restore status says 45 539 files pending restore – but in fact many have been restored

That was enough for the night (11.30ish). In the morning I received this:

Overnight 7500++ files were restored thanks to @CarboniteAU a quarter of the way there!!

And then 10 minutes ago (3.30pm on the Saturday) I received this:

Must say @CarboniteAU back-up has worked very well – highly encourage you to invest $70 per year into this online back-up service

So a happy ending. We expect nothing less. We say it will save you and we expect that it will, over and over. I read an interesting quote about hard drives this week. There are two types of hard drives, those that have failed and those that are about to. Get yourself protected so that you can be up and running in no time.