Carbonite

Download Carbonite

Backing up your computer is something no one wants to think about. Anything you can do to configure once and forget about it is a smart backup system, because you'll be more likely to stick with it. A new service called Carbonite aims to do exactly this for Windows users. Install their backup utility on your computer and they backup some or all of your computer to a secure account for $5 per month (or a little less if you subscribe for a full year). Backup works a number of ways: you can automatically backup everything in your My Documents and on your desktop; you can backup specific files and folders; or you can backup your entire hard drive. I'm sure the backup process gets ugly if you decide to backup thousands of songs, but for documents, photos and other smaller footprint files, backing up makes perfect sense. There's a right-click menu feature installed to make it easy to add a file or folder to the backup queue. And restoring is just as easy. Priority settings are adjustable so you make sure things like VoIP calls don't suffer as a result of uploading massive amounts of data to your Carbonite account. A free 15-day trial gives you the chance to test the service. [Windows XP $5.00/month]