I was in Best Buy last week and I ran into a friend of mine that I had not seen in a while.  I love Best Buy, it’s one of the only brick and mortar stores that I go to anymore.  Anyway, I was talking with my friend and she was there buying a HUGE pack of CD-R’s (writeable CD media).

I asked her what they were for and she said that she and her husband had gone to Paris for three weeks and she had all of these pictures that she needed to “burn”.  She has one of those cameras with a 40 gig harddrive in it so she had quite a bit of video and images that she needed to backup.

I asked her if she was making copies of the CD’s for family and friends and she said that wasn’t the case, that this was her way of “storing” the images in her library.  I asked her how long she had been doing this and she said “years and years”.

That’s when I told her that CD’s were not the best way to do this because of the fact that they “de-laminate” over time which means that the data becomes useless after a period of 10-15 years or so.  It doesn’t always happen but it had happened to me so I was speaking from experience.

She had never heard of that and I told her that she should go back and look at some of the older cd’s in her collection to see if they work or not. 

Two days later she called me in horror stating that some of the oldest cd’s weren’t working at all.  She brought them to me and although they weren’t de-laminated, they were burned with a very old cd-burning unit that was proprietary and had to be viewed with that unit to work.  Well needless to say that cd-rom unit was long gone.  So I spent a few hours helping her find some software that would let her read the disk but it cost her $150 bucks.

It appears that there is big money in OLD TECHNOLOGY!

She lamented that now she had to go and “re-burn” all of the old cd’s into new cd’s which reached in the number of over 300.  That’s a lot of time!

I suggested a different strategy for her.

Her computer has 500 gigabytes of room, and her computer has the ability to add a second hard drive.  I suggested that in her case that she just buy another 500 gigabyte harddrive (just over $150) and let me install it for her.  Then she could just move the data from the CD’s back onto the new harddrive!

But that only solved half of the problem.  How to keep the images SAFE!

You see, her house burned down when she was younger and still living at home, and many of her family’s pictures and portraits were ruined or destroyed.  So she had a real fear of losing her memories.

That’s when I recommended that she try CARBONITE Backup software to create a backup of all her images.  Carbonite keeps your files safe on huge secure and private computers, and the software backs up your files throughout the day via an internet connection so you don’t have to plan anything or schedule a time to backup.

She wasn’t sure about using the internet, and I told her that she could try it FREE for 15 days and told her it was definitely worth a shot.  So she tried it and loves it.

The cost of the service is about the same as a huge pack of CD-R’s or DVD-R’s, you just don’t spend all your time burning disks!!!

I use it and love it.  I back up with it and had to recover using it and it’s effortless.  Very Easy!

If you want to learn more about CARBONITE, Click Here or on the Banner below.

Bruce