Carbonite mirror image

[Rick Hoge]

*New! Create a mirror image of your computer* (Carbonite)

Just saw this on Carbonite's site. Since I already have an account does anyone think this would be a good add on. Haven't yet found out the cost as sales is closed.

[jstoddard]

Re: Carbonite mirror image

Carbonite now offers 3 home office plans -- $59, $99, and $149. The feature you're talking about, essentially a drive image, plus the ability to make a simultaneous copy to a local drive are available in the top two packages. So it's $40 over and above the base.

Not following you "Sales are closed" Last I knew you just signed up online 24/7/365 . I'm pretty sure you can upgrade at will -you'll get charged a proactive amount for the balance of your current account.

Would it be a good feature? Possibly. I definitely recommend drive images for rapid recovery - it takes about 2 hours to recover an image that's stored locally on a USB hard drive -- a lot better than a weekend of flipping CDs and scrambling to find stuff you've downloaded. The $40 is no worse than having to buy an external hard drive and some software to make the image.
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--EDIT----
At first I thought the "mirror" feature was in the cloud - but on further research it's not. It's only for external hard drives. So they're giving you some cloud-based software to make a drive image on a local hard drive. That's not really worth $40. Furthermore - they used to give you the ability to do a local data backup in their base $49 (at the time) accounts. Since you have to supply the external hard drive I'd say 'no' that's not worth an extra $40/yr. There are stand-alone programs that cost less and probably do a better job (Acronis, etc.)

If you're willing to spend $100/yr instead of $50/yr - I'd look into one of the Save-and-Sync services I wrote about in JLC a couple months ago. I spend $20/mo for 100GB of storage on DropBox - other services are similar. Those types of services are more versatile than Carbonite or Mozy. You pay more for the collaborative capability - but a DropBox account (for example) makes a pretty good client/project document management system - plus it's serving as an online backup.

JLS

[BeachBoy]

Re: Carbonite mirror image

Next time you upgrade your computer, be sure it has the capability of doing RAID Mirroring. You put two identical drives inside the computer and the hardware keeps a mirror image on the 2nd drive. This solves the problem of a drive going bad, (but does not solve the problem of somebody or a computer failure erasing or writing over your data). DO NOT DO STRIPING!!!

Couple that will a Carbonite backup plan.

For extra safety, write critical files onto a DVD every week and put it in your safe deposit box.

[Rick Hoge]

Re: Carbonite mirror image

Thanks Joe,

I just went from XP to Win. 7 on a new computer. It took me about 3 weeks to get everything (completely) over to the new computer from carbonite. Then I had to load every copy of Softplan back to V10 and then every patch. I try to keep the plans I created in earlier versions of SP in the version I created them in as I have had a few problems in the past.

It would have been a lot easier with an external drive.

I'll do some research on external drive and mirror software.

Thanks BB, what is * RAID Mirroring*

[BeachBoy]

Re: Carbonite mirror image

... what is * RAID Mirroring*

Instead of installing one disk drive you install two. The hardware (or sometimes the software) is configured to write any changes you make to the data on the first disk, to the second disk. It does this in real time.

So instead of having one disk with your data, you have two disks with your data. The second disk is a mirror image of the first. You don't have to do anything to keep this mirror image up to date, the computer does it for you.

If either of your hard drives fails, the computer will keep running, but will let you know that one of the drives has failed. You buy a new drive, replace the failed drive, and the system hardware or software recreates a mirror image.

You have to buy a computer that has RAID Mirror capability, and of course a second drive.

This fixes the problem of a hard disk drive failure (which is inevitable sooner or later).

It doesn't fix the case where something goes wrong and you or a virus or a program erases all your data. That's why you still need to have your data backed up somewhere, like on Carbonite.

Last time I upgraded my wife's and my computer I bought used Dell 755 computers on E-bay that were just off lease so were still on Dell warranty. The 755 will do RAID 1 (mirroring). There are more current computers, or you can buy a new one.

The most likely failures on a computer are the disk drives and the power supplies. There are computers available with dual redundant power supplies, although they are typically server class machines. I have one of those, an Intel Server. But I don't run it any more due to the power consumption.

Don't forget to put your computer on a UPS too. It provides protection from spikes which can damage the hardware, and provides for a controlled shutdown in the event of power loss. An uncontrolled shutdown can result in data corruption to your hard drives, something you want to avoid.

[jstoddard]

Re: Carbonite mirror image

Rick
BeachBoy gave you a good explanation - but I would add that RAID is NOT the same as creating a drive image for purposes for backup. That's something you do as an event - RAID happens continuously in the background and is specific to that machine.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks/Drives. To do it you need multiple drives - but you also need a "RAID controller". This can be software (part of the OS - Windows server has RAID built in) - or hardware. Hardware is a MUCH better option.

There are several levels of RAID. MIrroring without parity (RAID 1) is the simplest by far and is what you're talking about.

Mirroring does give you great redundancy and fail-over.... but it comes at a price. A RAID controller has to write to two hard drives at the same time - that slows down the write process. Balancing that out...some RAID controllers allow simultaneous read from both drives, speeding up the read process. .

Here's a Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
If you're interested in this topic read it through and I'll do my best to answer any questions. We almost never install RAID on workstations - only servers. And then we'll use a mix of RAID 1 and RAID 5. Read the article and that will be clear.

JLS

[Rick Hoge]

Re: Carbonite mirror image

Thanks Joe & BB,

Excellent info.

I assume something like this would work, only with more capacity:

http://www.amazon.com/Memorex-Mirror.../ref=de_a_smtd