Easy go easy come
That was the story surrounding my laptop a week ago. Vista failed and so I decided to wipe the machine and start again. Along with Vista went my data. So I spent Saturday morning loading Carbonite back on. I hadn’t done this for my own personal data in a very long time. In actual fact, I hadn’t had a PC crash since I purchased Carbonite, which is over a year ago now.
My backup consists of a second internal hard drive (which keeps a copy of all my files). Its not synced regularly enough though and this is something that I have to fix this time round. I also have 2 external drives that are pretty much copies of each other.
My only up to date form of backup is Carbonite, and the fact that it was up to date was a real blessing because the last time I had updated the files on the external hard drive was in August. You see I know better but its still a very painful exercise to manually do backups.
I reinstalled Carbonite pretty smoothly and noticed that after the install the restore options included Remote Access and a full restore. Remote access is now your “quick I need 10 files brought down” solution. I did as it advised and used it to bring back some key invoicing files that I was needing to work with. Presto within seconds the spreadsheets where back onto my PC and I was on my way.
This is where you say $72 well spent.
Now it was time for the full restore. I only use Carbonite for work related files not so much for photos, although I do have some photos. What I am getting to is that my backup with Carbonite is under 10GB. The challenge I have however is that my Optus internet only gives me 12GB per month. Not enough, but until I change it its what it is. So the dilemma I had was how to bring the data down and not exceed my limit. Optus charges an arm and a leg for excess data (all in the T/Cs of course).
In a normal month it wouldn’t be an issue but given I had been downloading files to bring the laptop back from the dead, I had spend a considerable about of my bandwidth and the month had only just begun.
So what I decided to do was to move my Carbonite installation out of Restore mode, ie into Backup mode and then manually bring the files down set by set until I had it all down. I used the Carbonite Backup Drive for this. This basically means that the most important files come first and then the rest gradually. I was and am keeping a close eye on my bandwidth spent.
So the restore options now available with the latest version of Carbonite, are to either do a full restore, search for individual files (by name) and restore them one by one or to use Remote access to manually sort through your files and restore the ones you want. An improvement they can make is to allow you restore folders as well as individual files.
If you want to manually move through your files and folders ie via your Backup Drive, you need to get yourself out of Restore mode. This has a catch however. If the files aren’t restored to the exact same location as they are held on the Carbonite servers, Carbonite will begin deleting the Backup thinking that you have removed it intentionally. You have 30 days to get your files back before you lose them from Carbonite as well.
Next week we are going to go through what I experienced moving from Vista to Windows 7.
