Carbonite - Best PC or Mac Backup Software Program

This post brought to you by Carbonite. All opinions are 100% mine.

Computer storage devices such as hard drives are susceptible to crashes, which can put any important files that you have stored in danger of being wiped out. Though you can create backups of files and folders on other storage media, you can also use services such as Carbonite  online backup to create backups online, after which you can restore the backed-up files whenever you want.

Carbonite is a service that backs up the valuable data on your PC or Mac.  The service downloads a small program on your computer that sits in the system tray.  That program will back up most of your files automatically and anything you tell it to backup.  The program also constantly looks for new files to backup and updates to previously back-up files.  If you have, say, a spreadsheet backed up, and you make changes to it, the updated file will be backed up within minutes. Once your initial backup is complete (it can take days depending on how much needs to be backed up), subsequent backups take a few minutes or less. According to the Carbonite website, your data is stored at their datacenter and is encrypted for security. To access backed up files, you can get to your backup through My Computer. More than that, you can access the backed up files from your mobile phone, using the free Carbonite apps designed for the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry or Android smartphone. Other things you can do include the management of your own encryption key and the priority setting for choosing the files to be recovered first.

However, Carbonite online computer backup will charge you yearly to store your files on their servers.

Carbonite comes with a free 15 day trial.  After that, it costs $59 for one year, $118 for 2 years, and $177 for 3 years.  Even at one year at a time, that's still less than $5 a month.  That's a very reasonable price for such a valuable service. But now you can use the offer code “BLOGAD” to get your two free months with the purchase.

I encourage you to give Carbonite a try.  If you don't like it, just uninstall the program, and your data is deleted from the backup in 72 hours.  You don't have to give any credit card information until you're ready to purchase the service.