[MichaelsMomJo]

I found this very interesting little trick to make Carbonite think that the contents of your external hard drives are just another folder on your C:\ drive. Those in the know say that it works! I haven't tried it yet but I'm going to. I'll let you know what happens. In the meantime, if anyone else wants to give it a go, here are the instructions:

http://www.modzone.dk/forums/showthread.ph...mp;threadid=278

Hope everyone's having a good weekend!

[angelaNussbaum]

I can see how they do it. But i for one have learned lessons about manipulating drives like that. Id be careful if you decide to do it..


besides.. personally thats goes against my views of honesty

angela

[MichaelsMomJo]

The beauty of this is that it is not a manipulation of a drive. Basically, it is nothing more than creating a folder on your C:\ drive and directing it to another location to look for its contents. The C:\ drive is left unchanged and your external hard drives retain their drive letters. Because Carbonite can back up any folder on your hard drive, it recognizes the folders and will pull the files for backup.

The creation of folders to access other drives is pretty common. It's just that someone out there realized this would work as a way to use Carbonite for backup of EHDs.

Hope that explanation helps.

[Susan Neff]

Len-from-Carbonite said (I think it was a couple months ago) that they were working on getting it to back up EHDs. I don't know if that's a separate service, or part of the regular service, but I'm anxious to know when that will be ready!

[MichaelsMomJo]

I also checked Carbonite's website for that info. Right now they still don't have the capability to do it, but are still working on it. According to their FAQs (and I had to dig deep to find this) when they have the ability, they're not sure if they will create separate service plans or just have one plan that includes it (my guess is there would be a price increase).

Another option that I discovered last night, and it's one I might try because of its higher ratings by reviewers, is to use the Mozy backup service ( http://mozy.com ). You get unlimited storage, the ability to backup external drives, for $4.95 a month. So it comes out to be a little less than $10 more per year than Carbonite is. But my guess is that Carbonite will increase their prices if and when they have the ability to do external device backup anyway. I think I'll just pay the extra and start doing it now. I'll let you all know how I like it.

[Stacey H.]

Oh I am very interested to see how you like mozy! I haven't used Carbonite because I need something to backup my EHD and they didn't offer that service. Please let us know how you like it.

[Susan Neff]

Thanks for the info, Jo! I hadn't heard of that service before.

Every time I hear something about someone's system going down, I think to myself, 'but for the grace of God...' I really need to get on top of backing things up!

[dawnsmemories]

I decided to try out Mozy since I couldn't get Carbonite to load up?? Anyway, I am sure their customer service will get that worked out on Monday since I tried it on the weekend but I love the idea of EHD being covered also. When it was just my computer it was 9G now, it is 113G! Oh my! This is going to take FOREVER! I figure it would be worth the $5 to try and I loooked online and it seems to have very favorable reviews. I'll let you know as I go along, it has only backed up 508MB so far. I started probably 3 hours ago.
Dawn

[angdrumm]

I am trying out Idrive-E as we speak, but I am not impressed so far. I kept getting a message to install something from MSOffice when I started the thing up. I had to cancel it about 10 times before it started. I am waiting to hear back from the techie guys.

I didn't realise that Carbonite didn't back up from EHD's. Does anyone know if it will back up from more than 1 hard drive inside your PC?

[MaryJo]

I am interested to know how it all turns out. This is an interesting topic to listen to ! I love to learn like this. Its great to be able to share opinions in a safe environment ! Another one for Ro and her resourcefullness.... Thanks girls .

[MichaelsMomJo]

I am a true Mozy fan (sorry all you Carbonite folks)! I started using it about 3 weeks ago. My internal hard drive and my external hard drive are backed up. It took about 5 days total (although I did turn my computer off at times) to back up about 70 Gigabytes. Now, I don't even know Mozy is running. The only thing it doesn't do is put little dots on your files the way Carbonite does, but since all my data folders are part of my backup scheme, I know that everything new I create or anything I change is being backed up. I couldn't be happier with the service.

[angdrumm]

After writing my post above, I contacted Len from Carbonite (what a helpful chap he is ) and he says that carbonite will back up as many INTERNAL drives as you have, just not external ones at present.

[Mommymosier]

This may be a pretty dumb question (forgive me if it is) but do these backup services write over the previous backup with every backup? Here are my thoughts that lead to this question. I have a 120 G EHD that contains mainly pictures, music and scrapbooking materials. I purged through it's contents when I filled it up a few months ago so that it is now lighter but I know it will fill up again sooner or later. Since I know I can't keep EVERYTHING on my EHD and certainly not on my C Drive since it slows my computer, do I rely on DVDs to store things I want to keep but don't have room for on my drives?

Thanks in advance. I'm going to check out Mozy now.

[MichaelsMomJo]

Mommymosier, on Nov 2 2007, 01:04 PM, said:

This may be a pretty dumb question (forgive me if it is) but do these backup services write over the previous backup with every backup? Here are my thoughts that lead to this question. I have a 120 G EHD that contains mainly pictures, music and scrapbooking materials. I purged through it's contents when I filled it up a few months ago so that it is now lighter but I know it will fill up again sooner or later. Since I know I can't keep EVERYTHING on my EHD and certainly not on my C Drive since it slows my computer, do I rely on DVDs to store things I want to keep but don't have room for on my drives?

Thanks in advance. I'm going to check out Mozy now.

That's a good question and an important one. The answer is this. Neither Mozy nor Carbonite is an archival service. They do not keep archives of your drive images as they appeared at each backup because they do not do full backups except for the first time. They both provide what are called incremental backups. That means that they only save changes you make to files or new files you create. If you delete a file from your drive, it gets deleted from their server after 30 days. This is definitely the number of days with Mozy, and I believe it is also the number of days with Carbonite, although someone who uses Carbonite could probably verify that.

So you definitely should make copies of things that you want to keep but don't want on your drive. HTH!

[Mommymosier]

Thanks Jo, that certainly helps. I'm off to buy a stack of DVD's so I can archive a few dozen gigs.

[troyhill]

Carbonite is really useful things for the back of external hard disk. I have also use it for my business backup data. You can store unlimited data store in carbonite. It's really useful function of technology.