John:

I recently paid for a year subscription to carbonite.  Since I have signed up both my husband and I can barely work on the internet (we are on the same high speed network at home). It is very slow and sometimes wont even work at all. I emailed them and they told me about two settings to change to make it work faster and that did not help…. so I wanted to see if you experienced this, and if you made any other changes to your settings to prevent it from happening.

Dear Carbonite Customer,

Your Carbonite Online backup subscription for your computer JOHN-PC is scheduled to automatically renew in 7 days. When you signed up for Carbonite you selected automatic renewal billing which provides uninterrupted backup protection.

You do not need to do anything! Carbonite will automatically charge the regular subscription price of $54.95, to your credit card, ending in 6941, in 7 days. Once the payment has been processed, we will send you a separate confirmation email/receipt.

I can’t tell you, after two hard drive failures, how comforting it is to know everything on my PC is backed up. Not just once a month, but every night. And I do nothing but sleep while it happens. You can try it for FREE here.

Update 3/19/10 – I just saw where Mosy has a 20% discount good anytime this month.
Mozy Home subscription and use the coupon code Gold

Free music for the holidays

Here’s a list of Holiday songs and some sources.

If you are doing a Christmas/Holiday ride in your Spinning Indoor Cycling class , then you’ll want to download these free mash-ups from A Very Bootie Christmas. Fun and irreverent. Here’s a very fun song, The Christmas Can Can – you can only buy the cd here but the track is on iTunes. (All these songs are thanks to several Pedal-Oners).

From eMusic, you can search under Christmas for a variety of Christmas albums of every genre. If it’s your first time at emusic you get 25 songs free.

Here are some samples:

* A Charlie Brown Christmas
* Christmas a Go-Go (with Brian Setzer, Bob Seger, Ramones, The Kinks and more)
* Christmas Rocks
* Jethro Tull Christmas Album (believe it or not – some good stuff!)
* Sounds of the Season (with Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, etc)
* Butch Walker – Christmas All Over Again

Knowing me, my brother Dan suggested I look at an online backup service. Specifically Carbonite because he has had good experiences using it with his clients.

In November it happened again. But this time I lost nothing! I still had all my documents, photos, my client’s numbers for their mobile phones and importantly, my music. And It is so simple to use as well. Watch this video where I recover my iTunes music and all my other data using Carbonite Recovery.

You just have to remember

You can't fix these with any of the wrenches I own

For the second time this year a hard drive in one of my my Dell Laptops failed with all my itunes music. We caught the one in February in time for my brother Dan to copy all the data to a new hard drive and everything is good. But it taught me a lesson that it was foolish not to have some type of regular backup in place.

This time, not so lucky. We were able to recover many of my documents but certain “sectors” were not readable. Thankfully I have had Carbonite backing up the hard drive so the 40+ GB of music I have isn’t lost. Now I just have to wait until my new computer comes so I can tell Carbonite to restore all my data.