Will Carbonite also backup programs and applications in a form that would allow them to be installed and run without the hassle of rebuilding ones pc in a crash?

Posted by Joe on April 9th, 2009

The following post in our Reader Question series is an actual user submitted question. To maintain the integrity of the original question, we do not edit or change reader questions in any way.

Q: Will [Carbonite] also backup programs and applications in a form that would allow them to be installed and run without the hassle of rebuilding ones pc in a crash?

A: By default Carbonite only backs up your data and files in the Documents and Settings folder or your User's folder of your Windows PC, depending on whether you have XP or Vista. It does not backup a disk image. You can manually set the software backup to include program files, system files, and temporary files. Some applications could be reinstalled just by restoring them from Carbonite's site.

However, Windows locks some system files during operation that would be needed to restore the operating system and some applications. Backing up and restoring these files, like the registry, would require other programs or scripts to be run to extract these locked files for backup. Of course, you would have to load a new operating system on the computer and the Carbonite program before you could access and download the files that had been saved to your Carbonite account.

You can learn more about Carbonite by visiting our comparison and reviews of online backup services.

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