I thought some of our small business customers would appreciate a story like this.
I just wanted to share this story to hopefully help others avoid a tragic mistake that so many experience everyday. I am an independent business, doing video post-production work for clients on all sorts of projects, large and small. I had historically backed up my data locally, replicating my hard drives on 2 or 3 external backup drives. About 4 months ago, however, during lunch with one of my clients, he mentioned that he had signed up with a new backup service called Carbonite. He liked the convenience of the service since he could simply let his backups run to a remote site and not have to worry about maintaining anything.
I was skeptical at first, since I didn’t like the idea of sending my critical information anywhere offsite. But my client raised a good point – a lot of Fortune 1000 companies are doing just this – using services such as Salesforce.com – outsourcing IT infrastructure is just the new way of doing things. If you want to compete, I remember him saying, you’ll need to focus on your core business and not have to worry about hot-swapping drives and power redundancy, etc.
Well, I decided to sign up for a trial of Carbonite, and after discovering that the service only costs around 5 bucks a month, wondered why I had spent all that time and money worrying about hard drives. Still, I thought the service had to be complex and would go down on me at some point, as do most online services (right when you need them). To my surprise, however, Carbonite was very easy to setup – it’s a lightweight application that installs on your computer in seconds, and then after a brief setup process where you tell the app which folders and files you want to backup, it does the rest for you. Much easier than configuring windows and various utility apps to replicate folders locally!
Anyways – the critical part of the story came months after setting Carbonite up. I live in the Los Angeles area, which is not exactly known for it’s tropical thunderstorms, but we had a bad storm one winter. I remember watching the TV and then suddenly everything went dead. Not a common occurrence, but I figured that it was just a routine power outage.
I few minutes later the power came back on and after checking on a few things in my apartment I wandered into my home office to do some work. I tried to boot up my computer, and nothing, It was dead. I tried everything and realized that both my computers were fried. So much for my power surge protectors, I later found out that mine was only rated up to 30 volts! So I lost 2 computers and all the data on those.
The crazy part was that I was just finishing up a huge animation project that was a 4 month contract with a major studio. I had gigabytes of files across all my drives that were lost. I took out my laptop and logged into Carbonite, crossing my fingers that the data was still there! To my relief, once I logged in, I found that all my data was there and ready to be downloaded.
Had I somehow lost all that data, I would have defaulted on a $50K+ contract, not to mention the ramifications on my business overall from losing out on a successful outcome with a marquee client. I can tell you that the experience was heart-wrenching, but the relief I felt from seeing all my data there safe in a remote data center somewhere just convinced me that backing up your data is just a good insurance policy that’s worth much more than the $7 a month it costs!
Hopefully my story will help others avoid a terrible outcome when disaster strikes – you just never know when something crazy and unexpected can happen!
When I first starting working at Carbonite Australia, I read through many of the articles written by Carbonite Inc in the US about clients losing their data, I also read as much research as I could about the statistical probability of your hard drive failing. Almost 12 months on and with our client base growing here in Australia, it amazes just how many calls we get from customers who have just had a PC failure and want to know how they use their Carbonite subscription to recover their lost files.
We get several calls a day and they make for great stories when you are on the phone with a customers wanting to know more about Carbonite and how it works.
Today’s post has more to do with an article in The Age yesterday on Data Recovery. It was written by Dave Thompson (Digital Life section). The point of the article was that hard drives fail all of the time, even new ones, in new PCs. When this does happen, most people rush to their nearest PC store (or where they purchased the hardware from) to get advice on how they can recover their data. As Data Recovery is a specialist field, most PC stores will tell you that the data is no longer recoverable and you should forget about it and start again.
The price for data recovery of a failed hard drive can run into the thousands, all depending on who you go to and how desperate you are to get the data back.
Dave goes on to explain (in much detail) about the physical make-up of the hard drive as well as how it works and what happens when it gets damaged. He also leaves us with the message that if we really want to recover our data, it is worth while that we seek specialists in the field of Data Recovery rather than a general PC store. And it is certainly not something you would want to try on yourself.
The issue is that many computer “repair” people aren’t up with data recovery and file this sort of thing in the “too hard” basket.
They either arbitrarily replace the drive or wipe the contents and start again, claiming recovery is impossible.
My advice, if you are very attached to the “lost” data, is do nothing with the drive and seek a second opinion, preferably from someone who advertises “data recovery” services.
Ask about methods used and go for those who sound like they know what they are doing.
Avoid running the drive as this can make things worse, and resist the temptation to “have a go” yourself; data recovery is a specialist field and the best option is to let them work their mojo. You’ll find many operate a no data/no charge policy and really, by that stage what have you got to lose?
Online backup services such as Carbonite are getting more and more attention from PC media each day. This is because they have become a real option for the consumer and small business. Two or three years ago, offsite back up was only for the mid to large sized businesses, today we can all access the same service and pay less than $6 per month for it. How is that for technology making our life easier.
Data recovery with a service like Carbonite is relatively simple. Once you have your PC back up and running, you simply log into your Carbonite account, reinstall Carbonite and then begin the restore process by selecting which files you want to download. If you want access to your files before your PC is ready, then use the Remote File Access service to download the files off the internet.
I have had a my hard drive crash a few times and had most of the data recovered. It cost about $50, but I did lose quite a bit of data. Thankfully I now use Carbonite so I have my important files backed up offsite automatically for me.
Carbonite, the leading online backup service for consumers and small business, announced today it had surpassed 200 million files restored through the Carbonite Online PCBackup™ service.
“I’ve never had a business before where you actually get fan mail every day,” said Carbonite founder and CEO David Friend. “13 percent of our customers have had to do a complete restore and 46 percent have restored at least some of their files. When you’ve lost your files, the $60 for Carbonite seems like such an insignificant amount. So a lot of people send us their thanks. We’ve now saved over 200 million files. That milestone represents a lot of happy customers.
Since it was founded in 2005, Carbonite has backed up more than three billion files in addition to the 200 million files restored.
