Think 6 - Carbonite the wave of the future

I chose the web site carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/en/) from the list of award winners.  This website is very personal to me, since I've been a subscriber for about three years.  This website will give you a free month trial for online back up to see how you like it.  If you don't want it, no pressure just uninstall the program and go on about your merry way.  If you do like it, you can pay a modest fee of $59 a year for unlimited back up of your computer.  For a little more you can get a few more features, but for the $149 package, it will back up everything on your computer and external hard drive and even make a mirror image of your drives in case you need to restore everything.  I originally got carbonite because I didn't want to lose all of my family pictures and documents from over the years.  So I downloaded the program, installed it, and except for the lock in your toolbar, you wouldn't know it was even doing anything.  The program uploads the files and programs the user selects, to a secure server all while running quietly in the background.  The initial upload takes a little while, but you wont see any significant processing lags because of it.  Now for the question that I know everyone is wondering - have I had to restore files back to my computer?  Quite simply, yes.  About six months into using this program, my daughters thought it would be funny to play with my laptop.  So as they opened and shut the laptop, the game got more fun until it got shut with a little bit too much effort.  As a side piece of information, while your computer is running, the very fragile hard drive disk is spinning.  Slamming the lid shut while powered on will literally shatter the hard drive internal components. I never really knew this until one of my daughters told me the laptop wasn't working.  A trip to the computer repair shop and a new hard drive later, I reinstalled the carbonite software and retrieved all of the stored data. Everyone was happy, except for my daughters who paid $120 each for their part in wrecking the hard drive.  I would recommend this product to anyone with children or anyone concerned about losing valuable pictures or data.  I don't really see an application for this program for the library computers, simply because the majority of the data is saved to a thumb drive. The rest of the program data is all the same.  Their commercials catch phrase is "it's not a matter of if you'll lose your data, but when". This is a great program and I am actually surprised they didn't win more awards earlier.