Backup?

[Penfold]

Yay to Carbonite.

Missed it on my first sweep of online storage.

Just trialling it now but so far looks great for backing up my data drive. 90% I'm subscribe to that.

I have a few dropbox accounts - couple of 50gb paid for ones for clients and a free 10gb one for myself but it's more for stuff I want across different machines and locations.

[Carr0t]

I don't really like its distributed nature.  It always struck me as an unnecessary over-complication and an easy way to introduce confusion.  I guess I never saw the problem in having a central repository.

I guess if you're the only one working on the project it's not really a problem. Git still has a central 'master' repository. It deals *much* better than subversion when, say, 3 developers all check out copies of a project, edit it, and then all try to commit back to trunk. It also allows for very easy proper forking of projects and then re-merging of the fork back into trunk without excessive faffing. Once again if you're the only dev you're unlikely to be doing much forking for extra functionality or whatever.

Finally, I like how all the versions are stored, effectively, as diffs. I can quickly switch from version 300 to version 508 within the same directory with a simple git command, and make tags in the same way that can be easily checked out. The subversion method of effectively copying the project to a new directory to act as a tag always seemed to me to take up excessive disk space and just be a very clunky method of storing tags.

Each to their own I guess One of the major projects i'm working on is actually stored in subversion, and *mostly* it's fine. However that is 2 of us logging into the same copy of the repo on a development server and editing it there, rather than each checking out our own copy and running separate local dev servers. And even then we sometimes have really awkward inconsistency issues where we've had to make a very quick simple change on the live build to fix a simple bug (when dev had a lot of other unstable edits as well, so we couldn't just roll a new live version out) and then the next time we've tried to switch a tag over to live it's had a hissy fit. The problem wouldn't have occurred with git. It would have handled the merge fine.

[Penfold]

I also installed Carbonite recently and at the end of the trial decided to subscribe.  Google for a Carbonite Offer Code and you'll find a 20% off one that works pretty easily.  $75 for 2 years of unlimited storage.  Worth the piece of mind in my book.

Nice one

If you give me your user name or whatever then I'll say you referred me which should give you 3 months free according to their referral scheme.

[b00n]

However that is 2 of us logging into the same copy of the repo on a development server and editing it there, rather than each checking out our own copy and running separate local dev servers. And even then we sometimes have really awkward inconsistency issues where we've had to make a very quick simple change on the live build to fix a simple bug (when dev had a lot of other unstable edits as well, so we couldn't just roll a new live version out) and then the next time we've tried to switch a tag over to live it's had a hissy fit. The problem wouldn't have occurred with git. It would have handled the merge fine.

Not sure about this, if it encountered a conflict while merging, it surely would have conflicted whether using svn or git? :g:

FWIW at work we have 7-8 developers in our team and god knows how many projects, and I can't imagine the chaos of trying to solve conflicts between 7-8 copies of the same branch, let alone trying to merge those branches (which ones? all? some? one?) back into the trunk.

[TeaLeaf]

If you give me your user name or whatever then I'll say you referred me which should give you 3 months free according to their referral scheme.

PM'd to you

[TeaLeaf]

Bumping this thread to provide some handy info as I just did an OS change & a C: drive change.

Had old C drive with XP Pro.
Have several additional HDDs in the case, D, E & F.  All of which have bits of them backed up by Carbonite.

Bought new SSD and installed Win7 which became my new C drive.
D, E & F drives still there & unchanged.

Wanted to reinstall Carbonite to kick off my live backups again.

Spoke to Carbonite Support and they told me I would need to use the account manage page to:
-transfer subscription to new PC (new OS is treated as a new PC)
-then restore the files I had backed up to the system (but I saw that as pointless as D, E & F are still there and not changed).

Spent 30 mins discussing with a Carbonite Support rep.  Her final solution was:  
-use Account Management to do the Transfer to new PC
-when it asks to Restore select the 'No thanks I'll do it later' option
-then manually go and reselect the drives/folders/files you want backed up on Carbonite and it will upload them to back them up again
-after 30 days the old backups are purged if they are not restored.
So in essence this method gives you 30 days to re-backup files you already have.

BUT, in reality when I clicked the 'No thanks I'll do it later' Carbonite then immediately picked up D, E & F and gave me a green light against them confirming they were backed up already.  So the only thing it is backing up now is the new C drive data (which it does by default).

Pretty awesome really, and seriously pleased I do not have to re-upload many GBs of data via my 1Mbps ADSL line!  


Carbonite Support:
7/10 for the Carbonite Support for the helpful Live Chat facility and considerable time spent with me.  But they lost marks for not having sufficient experience to answer my secondary drive question.

Carbonite:
10/10 for Carbonite itself which clearly has its algorithms sorted nicely as it recognised it already had the stuff on my D, E & F drives and did not need me to re-select it!  Thus many hours of 256kbps uploading was avoided!

Highly recommended online backup service is Carbonite.

Reminder:
If you want to try Carbonite Online Backup then do TWO things:
-ask me for a referral code (I get an extra 3 months free storage if you sign up)
-Google for a Carbonite voucher code, it saves you about 20% and means unlimited online backups for 2 years is about $75.