What's Worse Than a Virus?

You might be shocked to learn that there may be a greater threat to you and your computer than a virus. So why haven’t you heard about this?

Because it’s boring, there are neither hackers the media can point to nor any cute names they can give the virus. But let there be no doubt the threat I’m about to tell you about can be far worse and cost you far more than a simple virus which can be removed with antivirus software.
So what is this great threat?
Hard drive failure- your computer failing to boot up to the desktop screen properly. I’m sure you have seen the “blue screen of death” before

76% of small business owners and users have lost significant data becuase of crashes, faulty hardrives, and other hardware issues not related to viruses. More than half of them failed to recover any data at all, these startling statistics were researched by FSB/Zogby International poll.

It’s important to note that hard drive failure does not give you any warnings before it happens. Simply put you can wake up one day and your computer will go to the blue screen of death. Just imagine, losing all your family pictures, videos, files, schoolwork, business documents, or anything else that may be important to you- you lose all this without having a chance to get them ever again. That is of course unless you hire the FBI forensics lab to do data recovery which can cost thousands of dollars.

I was reluctant for a long time to do this, but after doing the numbers, it just wasn’t worth it to risk losing everything. When I added up the software I owned, the documents I had, the pictures of my family that I would lose, it sealed the deal for me.
For about $50 a year (less if you buy 3 years), you can have peace of mind knowing that no matter what happens to your computer, everything you have ever put in there is safe.

Is Carbonite encrypted? Yes, as soon as it leaves your computer everything is encrypted.The company does not know nor do they care what you have uploaded. Nobody will look at your files, even if they did they wouldn’t see anything because carbonite encrypts everything.

Is it unlimited, well, I have over 100gigs so far with no problem.

Here is a screenshot of what the interface looks like:

Let me reiterate, once you install it on your computer they first few days it will safely upload everything the first time. After that it automatically does it for you, there is literally nothing for you to do.

If you need to access any files on Carbonite, you simply right click the icon in your startup menu and choose restore files, you simply browse it as you would any drive on your own computer. Trust me when I tell you that this has saved my behind more than a few times. As a website developer I work a lot with Dreamweaver, while it’s a great program it does lock up and crash from time to time. Luckily the lost files have been saved on Carbonite and I just download them from there.

Convenience: No having to plug in an external hard drive…besides how much of your time does this take? You would have to backup everything every few minutes in order to equal the consistency of Carbonite. Can I try it before I buy? Yes, they offer a 14 day free trial so you can try it before you buy.

Are they better than mozy? Well, I haven’t tried mozy, so I can’t tell you. From some of my friends, they claim to be pretty good as well.