5 Bucks a Day

OK, where have I been?  Yep, time flies, especially in the summer.  Vacation, the new launch of Earn1KaDay 2.0 and unfortunately some incidents that took my focus off this blog.

The most serious of which, I hate to admit, could mostly have been avoided.  About 3 weeks ago, I went into the office in the morning and turned on my monitor (I leave my PC on all the time, because sometimes I connect to it remotely to transfer files to my home or laptop PC’s), and the monitor stayed black.

So I figured something happened, power went out overnight or something, and I rebooted.  Clang, clang, clang.  I said to myself “now that can’t be good at all”, and eventually I received a message that it couldn’t find a hard disk on my computer.  Now that really can’t be good.

After trying a few more times, and hearing the clang, clang, clang where there should have been a whirr, I got out the phone book and started looking for hard disk recovery specialists.  I called one in ($225 an hour), he did try a few things, but got nowhere.

So there I was without my main computer, and my most recent full backup onto my external HD was about 11 months before that.

Yep, I should have known better.  I did know better.  I’ve been using PC’s for over 20 years and that was the first data loss ever, so when I heard horror stories, I said “it can’t happen to me”. I guess I was wrong.

Long story short, I’m going through recovery mode still.  Some files could be recreated.  Some were on my external HD, if they didn’t change since I got them, most of my bigger files were there.  Some files were on another PC because I liked the important ones to be in multiple locations anyway.  And a few things were gone.  I think nothing absolutely critical.

Some of my forum members recommended that I look at various backup solutions, and the one I like, and am using on my 3 computers now, is Carbonite.  It transfers your data to the Carbonite servers, so if you have a melt down, or a fire, or a flood, where even your external backup is lost, or if you have no backup, you’re safe.

The nice thing is you don’t have to remember to do a backup.  That’s perfect for me.  It transfers everything to their server when you first join, and it does take a while (you have to maintain an Internet connection, preferably high speed), while you’re off line.  I never notice any degraded performance because the software watches for inactivity, I guess.

After the initial transfer, things go much faster because it just transfers the changed files as they get updated.

For less than $5 a month, I sure sleep better now.  It works on Windows XP and Vista, and I guess they’re working on a Mac version.  My lost PC was Windows 2000, so it wouldn’t have helped me there anyway, but now I’m a Carbonite lover.

Here’s the thing.  Since I posted my troubles on the Earn1KaDay forum, 3 other members in the last two weeks have reported losing their disks as well.  So it’s not all that uncommon.  Maybe it’s the heat or humidity in August, but you really should invest in some offsite backup service, if not this one.

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