This is from a recent article in The Age & SMH regarding remote backup and small business.
Brisbane small-business owner Nathan Oldfield sells water filters online and backs up his business records with Carbonite. He recognised the service’s impact instantly.
“I have an IT background, so I know that the big thing about backups is to have them off-site,” Oldfield says.
“Queensland Water Filters is a very small business … and we could have saved our documents to disc and exchanged them with a mate but it’s a bit ad hoc.
“Knowing that documents are automatically and continually backed up off-site means if you lose something, it’s only about 10 or 15 minutes’ work at most. Then you can get online and retrieve the backed-up copy.”
Oldfield, who also runs an IT consultancy business, recommends Carbonite and similar email backup services to his clients. He has helped clients avoid the situation faced by ma.gnolia.com.
“I’ve never had to use it for myself, touch wood,” he says.
“But a client who runs a web design business had his site hacked. Doing backups to the cloud meant we could retrieve the information for him and get his site back up and running again.”
You can read the full article here or here
As part of our ongoing promotion of Carbonite and our relationship with PC Authority, the latest edition of PC Authority magazine includes a free 6 month trial of Carbonite. So if you want to try Carbonite and 30 days isn’t enough for you, then go to your local newsagent and buy a copy of the magazine. The 6 months free trial offers unlimited backup (note: video files are not automatically backed up).
This must be one of the best free online storage offers going around.
If you are looking for a free online storage solution, then start with the Carbonite 30 day no obligations free trial. Backup your entire hard drive via our online storage service free for 30 days. Test our restore capability as well as our remote access service that enables you to access your files over the internet.
If at the end of the 30 days you are happy then we welcome you to join us buy purchasing online. If Carbonite doesn’t meet your needs, then thank you for visiting us and you can simply uninstall Carbonite via your Windows control panel.
Carbonite’s free online storage trial doesn’t ask you for any personal details, simply register and try with an email address and password. No credit card required.
What is the difference between online storage and online backup?
There is a key difference between online storage and online backup. The first offers you the ability to store an amount of data on some one’s server and then access it via the internet as and when you need it. This data doesn’t necessarily need to reside on your PC i.e. you could have a hard drive of information that you wish to share or store online so that you can re-use the hard drive space. An online storage facility will enable you to transfer this information to the online server and have it stored and shared if you wish. Once you have done this, you can then remove it from the hard drive and begin filling the hard drive with new information, e.g. music, pictures, data, video. There is no syncing going on between the hard drive and the online storage facility. The online storage facility is simply another drive, but it’s online.
I received a phone call recently from a client asking me if Carbonite did online storage and I explained that yes we did. However, the Carbonite online storage solution was a backup of the data on your PC. That is what Carbonite and most online backup solutions do. He then explained how his business accumulating a lot of data on external hard drives which was costing him plenty and he wanted to find an online solution that would enable data sharing and save him money.
Unfortunately in this case Carbonite wasn’t going to be able to help him. Carbonite provides an online storage facility, but as a backup of the information on your PC. So once you have transferred a copy of the data to the Carbonite servers, should your PC die you can retrieve them. However, should you decide to delete the information from your PC to make space for newer information, then Carbonite will also assume that you don’t need it and will also delete it after 30 days.
The customer had already spent a few days searching for different solutions and after speaking with us, didn’t know where to start looking for online storage as opposed to online backup. I decided that I would assist him by doing some the research for him. I must say I found it very hard myself. I only spent an hour or so but reading through the many “so called” online storage solution websites, I quickly discovered that most essentially only offer a version of online backup. They all promise that you can access your data any which way you want, but at the end of the day, should you delete the data from your PC, the online storage facility will also delete it.
The trickiest part was Google AdWords. Look up Online Storage and you get 10 variations of online backup providers.
I did find a few however that catered for small volumes e.g. several hundred Gigs. The only provider that I could find that didn’t have restrictions, was affordable and allowed for sharing and communities was Amazon.
All in all it was an interesting exercise. What I also discovered is that there are so many online backup providers out there and the difference between is not very much at all when it comes to features (at least when you compare what they say via their website). The big ticket however aside from formally testing each one, is how financially stable the company behind the backup is and would you trust your data with them. Carbonite with over 600,000 customers is a very successful company that is here to stay. If you are looking for online backup, then your first choice is Carbonite.
