Carbonite Home Premier Review & Giveaway

Free year Carbonite subscription received and one provided for review.

One of my biggest worries as a mom is losing all of our family photos and videos. This is a well founded fear because in early December or so we got a new computer. I always believe in backing up everything as often as possible but for some reason with the bustle of the holiday season I uploaded photos and was going to set up the back up “tomorrow.” You know how that goes. Tomorrow becomes tomorrow and suddenly weeks and then a whole month goes by.

We celebrated Kora’s birthday and Christmas and took lots of photos and videos. Which I diligently uploaded to the computer to make sure there was room on the memory card. All was hunky dory when we left to visit my side of the family in Michigan. However, it was not hunky dory when we returned. I couldn’t get the brand new less than 30 day old computer to turn on. I asked Dave if he had turned it off in a way I didn’t know about yet. He said no, that he hadn’t turned it off at all.

We couldn’t figure out what happened. It worked fine before we left, it wasn’t used while we were gone, and now it wouldn’t even turn on. Dave called the tech support help line. I wasn’t too worried, I figured it was a small glitch in the new computer that they would tell him how to fix. They walked him through a number of tests which revealed that the motherboard was fried. Completely gone. Completely randomly.

My first thought was of all the pictures and videos from the past month. Pictures from Kora’s birthday, pictures from Christmas. They were gone. I hadn’t yet backed them up. I was heartbroken.

The company said we could return the computer to see what they could do to fix it and retrieve the photos. They tried but had no luck. The did send a replacement computer which has worked well since but I don’t trust it. I’m determined not to lose precious pictures and videos and important documents again due to a computer failure. That’s why I was excited about Carbonite.

Setting up Carbonite was easy and only took a few minutes. I signed up for the 15 day free trial first and when it expired I added my promotional code. Since we have a ton of pictures, videos, and files I have to be upfront and honest and say that it did take about 2 1/2 months for everything to backup.

When you sign up and get started you receive an email from Carbonite letting you know that most high speed internet connections can’t back up more than 3-4 GB every 24 hours. The good news is it all happened in the background and I didn’t notice any lag in connection speed when using the computer. The introductory email also tells you what files are being backed up.

I like that Carbonite continually scans my files and updates any changes or additions. You can see in the info center when everything was last backed up.

I also like that Carbonite offers “anytime, anywhere” access to backed up data so you can access your files from any computer, smartphone, or other device with an internet connection. It also makes me feel good to know that Carbonite provides bank-level security for all your files and they offer lots of help if you have questions.

Another feature I like is that you can backup from an external hard drive. This is good to know because many people save their important data on external hard drives. So you can back the drive up online with Carbonite for an extra layer of protection.

I’ve been pleased with Carbonite as an online backup system and I’m impressed by it’s number of features. I’m happy to know that our photos and videos are now safe in case something happens to our computer again, and I’m excited to offer the giveaway below!

WIN IT!

One reader of 2 Wired 2 Tired will win a Carbonite Home Premier One Year Subscription – $149 Value!

To enter use the Rafflecopter from below.