I, too, bought an external drive of 500GB, and I moved the Users directory, and most applications and "My Document" folders directly to it.

It is not inside the machine, but it is virtually a required part of my computer. I DON'T remove it when the computer is on, which is almost 24/7.

Since my last post, I switched to "Mozy Home" and dropped Carbonite. Mozy has the best structure for me in that it backs up my external drive, and "purges" files on a regular basis. The price per year is comparable to Carbonite.

Unfortunately, Mozy is full of bugs, and their "chat-only" help is too slow, and not very competent. They tend not to listen to the details I supply, and throw a bunch of "generic" solutions (e.g. reboot, reinstall, take two asprin and call me in the morning!). I have struggled to get the system working repeatedly, comsuming whole days of time, but it continues to fail sporadically – not an encouraging sign for the future. They can't seem to handle large files such as those that occur with a zipped full backup. I know it should take days to transfer such a file, but with their current system, it fails to move anything.

I just bought a new PC with a 1 TB internal drive, and am using my 1 TB USB drive as a local backup, so I just decided to dump Mozy and go back to Carbonite. I will back-up the other computers on my network to both the internal and external drives on my "primary" system, since the data sets there are relatively small. That way, Carbonite will cover everything, hopefully with no further problems.

For local backup I have been using Geniesoft, but their off-site storage is way too expensive. Their integration is a great idea though.

The other stopper is even more important to me: I have to specify each kind of file to back up. Oh, *horrors*!! What if I miss one, or some new product I install uses some new file extension and I forget to add it to the backups? I want to backup *everything* by default so I don't miss anything! Let me *remove* things from the backup (and it'd be fine for the installer to ask if I really want to back up *.tmp, ~*, *.bak, etc)

Before anyone argues you'd have a million copies of Windows XP/Vista/7 backed up, if you've done the data storage right (uh, in my rather arrogant opinion of 'right'… you'd only have one copy of each file, and a million *references* to that one copy.

I'll throw another drive internally and image the drobo onto it to satisfy the internal-only issue, but *please* let me set Carbonite to just plain back up everything!

I really wanted to use Carbonite because you're local (I'm in Needham) but the risk of missing some obscure – but important – file because it's got some odd extension is just too much for me.

It seems to me that you would be better to distinguish "archiving" from "backup" by function, not by drive configuration. It seems like this should mean that backed up files should "disappear" from the Carbonite servers, within a certain time (a week? a month?) after they disappear from the local drives. This is what Mozy does, although I find that their system is still very buggy.

What I do is use the 1 TB drive as a LOCAL BACKUP, which is done incrementally every night. What I want to use the unlimited Carbonite (or Mozy) for is to create an off-site backup of the "LOCAL BACKUP drive", not my "used all the time drive". If disaster happened to my "LOCAL BACK drive", and I had a fixed time period (a week? a month?) to restore IT from the off-site service, that would be more than enough. My real purpose in having off-site backup is to protect myself against a fire or other home disaster when I am away. My local backup takes care of inadvertent deletions and hard-disk failures.

As to Dalton's comment of July 13, 2009, I kniow that Carbonite keeps the files after they disappear from the local drive. Dalton, if you look at the info on the Carbonite virtual drive, you will see that such files remain there, but are flagged with a message to the effect that "the original file has been deleted". I try to clean up my Carbonite virtual drive by deleting those files, although I confess that I am not as dilligent as I could be!

"When you delete data from your PC, it gets deleted from the backup."

Am I missing something? Isnt that what data back-up is supposed to protect against? If I accidentally delete data or if a drive dies, would Carbonite assume I purposefully deleted it?

I understand not backing up network drives as it opens you to be backing up entire office networks, but the statements above are a little concerning.

Dave Friend, CEO

Carbonite, Inc.

David Friend | Chairman & CEO

Carbonite, Inc.

334 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02116

617-587-1110