Were you affected by the Gmail outage?  And more importantly,  if you are a Gmail [...]]]> Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, it was all over the internet headlines.  Gmail was unavailable for a few hours on Tuesday, but don’t worry fans, it was back by that evening.  And users around the world breathed a sigh of relief.

Were you affected by the Gmail outage?  And more importantly,  if you are a Gmail user, do you have a backup plan?

I have been using Gmail since 2004, and have a lot of information saved in my e-mail.  Addresses, contact information, pictures, recipes, directions, notes I don’t want to lose.  And since 2004, I’ve had few problems with Gmail.  Sure, a few ups and downs here and there, but nothing big. 

About a year ago, I realized just how stupid I was for not having any sort of backup.

Gmail is free.  There is no guarantee that it’s going to be here tomorrow.  Sure, the odds are pretty good, but nothing’s guaranteed.  And while I would pay for it, even a paid service is not guaranteed.  I backup my website regularly.  Why wouldn’t I backup my Gmail?

At first, I wasn’t sure how best to do this.  If you do a websearch, you will find plenty of options for how to backup your Gmail.  Some were more complicated than others.  I decided to go the easy route.  My hard drive on my old computer wasn’t big enough to hold my Gmail as well as everything else still on the drive, so I connected an external drive, started up an e-mail program, set it to store the e-mail on the external drive, and I was off.  The problem with this method was that I use a laptop and like to be untethered – meaning that I had to force myself to connect the external drive every week or so to backup my e-mail.

When I got my new computer in April, my problems were solved.  My hard drive is gigantic (comparatively speaking), and I set up Mail to use IMAP to regularly retrieve my e-mail.  In fact, I’ve stopped using webmail while I’m at home, choosing only to use the mail program on my Mac.  It was a transition, but one I’m glad I made.  During Tuesday’s downtime, IMAP and POP access to Gmail was still working, so my day was not interrupted at all.  But even if it had been, I still had access to everything already downloaded.  I hadn’t really lost anything.

I’m a huge fan of Gmail and don’t plan to change e-mail services anytime soon (I’ve even been on long enough to be able to get my very common name as my Gmail address – firstname.lastname@gmail.com – meaning that I end up getting lots of misdirected e-mails to people sharing my name), but I do recommend that everyone do something to backup their Gmail (or Hotmail or Yahoo!Mail or whatever service you use).  There are lots of options, so check them out and choose what’s right for you.

Color me impressed.

It’s so great to see a CEO so dedicated to the [...]]]> You probably missed it, but on my post about backup methods, I have been corresponding with Dave Friend, the CEO of Carbonite.  Seems that he found out about my blog post and decided to do everything he could to look into my problem.

Color me impressed.

It’s so great to see a CEO so dedicated to the quality and public perception of his company that he takes the time to personally comment on blog entries.  He also e-mailed me a number of times in order to try to help me with my problem.

Unfortunately, the end result was that they are aware that a few Mac users are having this sort of problem where the backup stalls.  It’s not everyone, but it does affect some of us, and they are working on it.  He also made sure that I got the refund I requested.

Given this level of service, I would love to be able to continue to use Carbonite, and offered to be a test subject as they try to fix this problem.  I thought Carbonite was great for my PC.  Unfortunately, I do want to be sure that my computer is backed up, and can’t afford to wait until the Carbonite problems are fixed.

Even though the end result is that I’m still not using Carbonite, I’m very happy with how this turned out.  My opinion of the company is once again very positive, and I will be recommending them to all the PC users I encounter.  Clearly, this is a company run by people who truly care about their product and their customers, and that’s so important.

So thank you, Dave Friend, for all your help and for your comments.  You provide a great service to PC users (and most Mac users) and I trust that soon, Carbonite will be an excellent service on both platforms.

Last year, I wrote a post about how important it is to back up your computer.  I stand by that information.  That said, I have to edit my product review.

At that time, I recommended Carbonite as [...]]]> Edit: Please see the note added at the end of this post for a comment from the CEO of Carbonite.

Last year, I wrote a post about how important it is to back up your computer.  I stand by that information.  That said, I have to edit my product review.

At that time, I recommended Carbonite as an easy “set it and forget it” style backup.  I had used them for years on my PC, was happy with how the backup worked, and while I had never had to use the restore feature, a friend had and it went quite smoothly.

When I got my new computer, this time a Mac, I was delighted to see that Carbonite was now available for Macs.  Wonderful, I said.  A company I already use and trust.

I stand by my recommendation for Carbonite for PC, but I cannot recommend it for Mac.  I have been using it for two months, and suddenly, my backups have just stopped.  I realized this when I discovered that my YNAB spreadsheet hadn’t backed up since May.  Now, I back that up by e-mailing it to myself, but if Carbonite was missing that, what else was it missing?  I’ve gone back and forth with their support, though I use the term “support” quite loosely.  I was told to uninstall and reinstall twice, that maybe it was a problem with my PC and to check the OS (note – Mac user), and I was told to be sure my computer wasn’t hibernating.  Great advice.  Then they told me that the problem was that Carbonite was backing up a temporary folder and that I should tell it to stop.  The temporary folder?  My folder of zipped backups from this site.  Not a temporary folder, not one edited automatically, but one that I personally drop a zip file into every week.  We’ve gone back and forth with them telling me it’s temporary folders and to stop all of those backups.  Except the folders they point out are either not temporary folders, are folders that Carbonite claims have already been backed up and caused no problems, or were taken off the list for backups days and days ago.

I’ve now asked for my money back.  I don’t expect to get it.  I will edit this review if I do, but right now, my only recourse is to get the word out and tell everyone out there about my Carbonite experience.

So what am I doing instead of Carbonite?  I did some research and found a program that works in a very similar way – Backblaze.  I read a couple of reviews and decided to give it a shot.  The best part?  It has a free 15 day trial with no limits on file size or speed, so I can try it out, see if it will backup my files, then decide if I want to pay for a yearly subscription or not.

Some of the features I love are that I can set my backup speed, so if I’m not using my internet at all, I can tell it to use as much bandwidth as it wants, but if I’m trying to watch something on Hulu, I can lower the speed.  So far, it’s fast.  Very fast.  I can also go to the website and see exactly what files have been backed up.  If I need to restore just one of my files because I corrupted something, I can go in and pull that specific file.  They also keep up to four weeks of file versions, so if I do something stupid like delete all the data out of my budget, I can go to Backblaze and pull a previous version.  It will also backup external drives (but not network drives).

If you do need to do a full restore, you have a few options.  You can download for free from the internet, or you can pay to have a DVD or a USB drive shipped to you.  Depending on your internet connection and the size of your backup, paying the extra money might be the better bet, but hopefully that’s a decision you’ll never have to make.

I’ll keep you up to date on how I feel about Backblaze, but so far, so good.

7/2/09  - As you can see below, I received a comment from the CEO of Carbonite, which I will reproduce here.

Megan, I am the CEO of Carbonite, There was indeed a bug in the first release of our Mac product (release 1.0) that did occassionally cause backups to stop. The problem was fixed in release 1.01 that went out last month. The very first release of any software is likely to have some bugs — no matter how much testing you do, only real world installations will find all the problems. If you reinstall your Mac software today, you will automatically get release 1.01 and you’ll find that the problem you described is fixed.

Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.

I will be trying out this recommendation over the weekend, and will definitely update everyone as to my results.  And I want to thank Dave Friend for being such a proactive CEO.  It’s not every day that your blog gets visited by someone so high up in a company.  Guess I was their squeaky wheel this time!

7/3/09 Update – Unfortunately, when I got home, I discovered that I did indeed have the most recent version of Carbonite, and it was still stalled.  On the up side, Backblaze had finished backing up my entire system.  Dave Friend contacted me again and agreed that there was a problem and that his engineers were looking into it, and that he would personally be sure to get me my partial refund.  Great customer service, and I will write on this experience more next week.  I stand by my Carbonite for PC recommendation, and hope that in the future, I can again recommend Carbonite for Mac as well.

Over the next few [...]]]> As I write this, on the table behind me are boxes and boxes of photographs.  I’m not sure where they start, but probably somewhere around elementary school.  I sorted all the photos from college and realized that they pretty much taper off by my senior year, when digital cameras became more prevalent.

Over the next few months, I plan to go through the photos and scan as many as I possibly can.  I then plan to keep copies on my computer, on my external harddrive, on a burned DVD to keep at work, and also backed up through Carbonite.  Excessive?  Maybe.  Worth it?  Absolutely.

This weekend, I spent a few hours trying to help a friend salvage as much as possible from her hard drive.  Her computer is only about a year old, and she has been obsessive about virus protection and about not letting anyone get near her computer with a drink or anything that could spill and destroy it.  Based on that, it seems that her hard drive crash is somewhat of a fluke and really just bad luck.  Because with all her precautions, the one thing she didn’t do is backup her files.

She’s got an iPod, so she didn’t lose the massive amounts of music she purchased.  She also uses Google Docs for many of her writing projects.  What did she lose?  Photos.  Probably a year’s worth of photos she had taken, plus pictures that she had been sent by friends after big events.  Sure, some of the photos are shared on Flickr, but not all of them.  She also lost a number of other documents that weren’t part of Google Docs.  Nothing horrible to lose, but all things that will take quite a bit of time to recreate.

The point of this post?  To remind everyone to backup their computers.  Back up your hard drive.  I recommend a system like Carbonite – you purchase, download, install, and it runs in the background, storing a backup of your computer offsite.  Yes, you can do it yourself onto an external hard drive (which I think is a good second backup) but if there is a fire or even something as simple as a burst water pipe that floods your home office, you could lose both your computer and your external hard drive.  Another option is to burn everything onto CDs or DVDs and store those discs at your office or at a friend’s house.  The problem there is that discs can be scratched, plus you have to remember to backup everything on a regular basis.

Do you have a website or a blog?  You should be backing that up as well.  Just because your hosting company runs backups doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the extra step to protect yourself.

So this is just a little PSA.  Backup your files.  Do it today.  It’s worth it.