WetLeather Motorcycle Rider Information

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I listen to Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech podcast regularly and occasionally catch his net simulcast of his KFI radio show "The Tech Guy". The latter is sponsored in part by Carbonite, an Interne online backup service. I've looked at a number of these types of services, but not found any that meet my needs for extreme *cheapness* and fairly substantial amounts of storage. Carbonite offers $50/y flat fee, with "unlimited" data transfer and storage for one computer.

It's all about backup - they don't pretend or promise to make any other type of access to your backed-up files available except through their backup application and their Windows Explorer plug-in, which are all oriented to backup and restore, no kind of casual access. They've apparently promised a Mac version, but delivery is long past initial forecast, so it's Winders-only. Terms of service and usage and privacy policy all looked about as good as it gets. They offer a free 15-day trial with NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED (you do not have to sign up and give complete billing info and "cancel later if you don't like it"), though I'd give it a try.

Installation under Vista Ultimate on my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop with 2GB RAM and a 200GB 7200RPM drive was simple and straightforward.

Selecting which files and folders I wanted backed-up and when I wanted it done was also straightforward. I chose not to use their "Wizard" that pokes around your disk looking for files that "should" be backed-up; I simply told it to backup all subfolders under my User folder (XP equivalent would be C:\Documents and Settings\carlp).

The backup process uses some algorithm to determine when your computer isn't "busy" and runs then. There's a status-monitoring panel in their app. From observation, it appears to decide that "a little" user activity isn't "busy", but running FF3 reading Gmail is more than "a little" and the backup will pause. I let it run undisturbed for an afternoon while I worked and it backed-up my 4.1GB "working set" in about 6 hours.

So I decided to give it a little more challenge. As you might guess, Carbonite's app won't let you select "network drives" (share from other computers) to be backed-up. I copied my "Pictures" library share from a server on the home LAN to the laptop's drive. That added around 8GB. Left the laptop on overnight, and it backed those up, too.

Digression: Vista, like XP and others, is subject to various kinds of progressive "slowdown" over time with high usage, especially for somebody like me who installs and tries and removes (or not) *LOTS* of assorted software. Many packages leave crud in the Registry, and while CCleaner is quite good at removing most of that, it's not perfect. A larger problem is with packages that install little "services" to do something for you, and many of them don't get removed, or not entirely removed, when removing the package. In truth, MOST of the stuff I've installed has been pretty good about dealing with this properly, but not always.

The WORST category of "slowdown causers" in my experience includes things that attache to your network stack. "Virtual Machine" software - especially VMWare, IME - is really horrible about this. Their virtual network drivers cause all manner of slowdown at startup and login, even if you tell them not to run. A close second for "worst" category is Mcrosoft's assorted development tools and accompanying cruft. I need some of this stuff for work, but it shifts over time, and trying to puzzle out exactly which "custom" configuration is least offensive is an annoying time-waster. If you think software "bloat" is an issue in Word and Outlook, you haven't appreciated Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition's default install.

Taken individually, none of these things is a Big Deal. But with the amount of software I install and remove and poke at on my main laptop, I end up with very interestingly long boot times and especially login times. With a desktop this might be a smaller problem> I very seldom reboot wither, but the laptop is set to auto-sleep on lid close with login required on wake, just for a halfhearted stab at secure practices. I move from one room to another (or deck, or garage) pretty often. Long login times are very annoying.

ANYWAY, since this isn't my first time at the dance, I have developed a sort of method to address this. When last I converted to Vista (April 2008), I took the time partway through the process to make a "basic load" disk image using Ghost. It's got the OS properly configured, with various other frequently-used tools and programs such as MS Office, Firefox, Keepass, Quicken, Roxio, Picasa, Putty, Vim, PaintShop Pro, and some others. Not a stripped-down set, but far from everything I expect to install. Each program used only enough to get it configured and registered and passworded and such. My personal working data, documents, etc. are excluded. A "load and go" disk image. The Ghost image is around 6GB.

SO, since my laptop was getting annoyingly slow in places, it was time to revert to the "basic load" and build on from there. This seemed like a good opportunity to experiment with Carbonite's Restore functionality. Belt AND suspenders - I made sure to run a fresh "weekly" backup, which copies all my documents and most of my settings and other stuff to a server on my LAN. And I started by making a full Ghost image of my current laptop Vista partition to a USB external drive (gigabytes are *cheap* these days). Then I blew it away and restored my "basic load" Ghost image.

Unfortunately, the version of Ghost that I use (a "DOS mode" executable from Ghost 10, run under a "BartPE" bootable CD) isn't Vista-aware. So it hosed up the boot loader and blew away the multi-boot configuration, and left my laptop unbootable. But this isn't my first time at THAT dance either. The Vista Ultimate bootabl install DVD will clear up the bootability issue in only 2 or 3 reboots and runs of the "repair my computer" feature. The freeware edition of "EasyBCD" will let you configure the multi-boot stuff almost as easily as editing the boot.ini text file used to do under XP (Boo, Hiss! Moving the configuration from an editable text file to multiple proprietary binary hunks in different places is a move in exactly the OPPOSITE of the right direction, Microsoft!)

Re-installing Carbonite to the same laptop from their websit took about 5 minutes, and offered me the option to put it into "recovery mode" immediately. That's a good thing. Restoring all the files (12,461 files, it says) took almost 24 hours. I was surprised it wasn't faster - download speed should exceed upload, doncha think? But I was impatient and kept *using* the laptop, configuring and installing other stuff, while the restore was underway. Not really a scientific test of the speed.

It seems to have all worked Just Fine.

I haven't yet decided whether I really need to spend $50/yr on ANOTHER belt to go with my current belt and suspenders: weekly backup to LAN server for each PC, plus daily automated backup to external drive [gigabytes are *cheap* these days] for each active PC, plus monthly DVD images from those backups). And I haven't decided whether it's useful to engage in more monkey-motion on the LAN in order to back up my ~90GB .MP3 music library to Carbonite, given that it's backed up by the current belt-and-suspenders AND I still have physical access to the CDs that are the source of *most* of those MP3s. But as I shift away from buying music on CD and the proportion of Amazon MP3 downloads gets higher, it might be worth considering.

Anyway, if anyone else is contemplating "cloud" backup services, I think Carbonite is worth considering.