Posted on 03/17/2012 10:18:22 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Question: When is a friend not a friend?
Answer: When his name is David... David Friend.
You may have heard the ads on the radio that Carbonite is the way to go when it comes to saving back-up copies of your computer files. Well it's not the only way to go. Take my Seagate one-hundred gigabyte back-up drive, it does everything that Carbonite does and for less. But I'm not here to shout out about Seagate nor any other storage device manufacturer...I'm sure there's other reputable builders out there. What I am here to talk about is the hypocrisy of Carbonite's CEO, David Friend.
Over at World Net Daily (WND) today there's a piece about Carbonite's stock taking a dive after the Rush Limbaugh incident (apparently investors are on Limbaugh's side but that's another story). What I find most disturbing about the WND article is the following:
"The Washington Times noted Friend has a long history of contributing to left-leaning candidates and causes. Citing Accuracy in Media, the Times reports Friend donated generously to the Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Barack Obama presidential campaigns, as well as several 527 groups such as "America Coming Together," moveon.org, and "Texans for Truth."
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I just can’t get past the idea of trusting anybody, other than myself, with my data.
At some point, somebody body with a societal changing idea is going to lose that patent, because these storage-cloud companies will steal it and cover their tracks.
And there won’t be anything you can do about it.
Over many years, I’ve watched many rock-solid internet based companies come and go. I’m sure glad I didn’t trust them to store my data. BTW, what do you think will happen to all the data they have stored in the event they go belly-up?
I purchased my first computer in 1982 and have bought many more since then and NOT ONCE did I ever lose data or had a system crash. What’s the big deal? How often does this happen?
Thanks SeekAndFind.
I totally agree.
A smart guy would invest in a Carbonite competitor, get them to pick up Carbonite’s Limbaugh spots and then watch their investment appreciate while Carbonite goes down in flames.
A bag of dried cow poo has more value than there product.
backup IS a good idea, and I do this for a living- I make backups by habit, and have been fortunate enough to have saved my own hide more than once
an off-site backup is so that if your house catches on fire you still have a backup off-site
People often do not see the need for backup until after their first major data loss. (i’e’ until its to late)
I would hate to lost all the pictures of my children, all the tax documents, all my professional work, etc... just because I didnt do a backup (and I would look like an idiot since this is what I do for a living)
Buy an external, buy two. transfer your data. Why anyone would do something like paying monthly for data back up is beyond me.
I just saw one of Carbonite’s scare commercials on TV where they have some mysterious person tell different people, “you are about to loose everything”.
I guess they are betting on a different market plan.
Your turn is coming. LOL
I thought the same thing and in 1997 my drive decided it had enough and spun.
Fortunately I had a program that could retrieve data (I don’t recall the name) . I tossed drive in the freezer for a couple of hours and then I quickly retrieved the data.
Now I back up to other computers, some off site and I own them. I also back up to portable drives and just recently began backing up my most vital information to 32Gig thumb drive
The world will probably have to end for me to lose all of my data.
Bing “safes with usb ports” and you will find lots of them that will keep a USB drive protected in an on-site fire while letting you control your own backups. We had Carbonite for several years and it worked well with our SecurStar full disk encryption. Then they “improved” Carbonite and it stopped working so we had to go with plan B. Much more comfortable doing it this way.
You could buy an external and give it to your mom, brother or sister and have them hook it to their internet connected PC. Have them then install CrashPlan.com and send each other invites. Now, you both have remote backups that can be restored if something happens to either of your homes.
That is my thought on all of the ‘cloud’ options. The company writes the software that does the encryption and there is noway to know if there is a backdoor to the system.
I just purchase a Synology 2 disk NAS. It is running at RAID 1 and allows me to access my data from anywhere in world thorough my laptop or my Android phone using HTTPS. True if the house burns down I would lose the data on the disk, but all of the important stuff is on DVD backup anyway and kept in a fireproof safe in the basement.
My data is never going to be out in the clouds.
The article asks a very good question: “On the one hand David Friend went out on a limb to build his company and on the other he’s supporting politicians that want to destroy the very thing that made him a success. Sounds hypocritical to me... What say you?”
Rush said: “Bye”
I agree.
Americans do not do business with Liberals.
Ditto! Only a fool would farm out the data to 3rd parties, and LOTS of people and businesses are doing it. If a business wants a "cloud", they should build their own. People should do their OWN external backups. It doesn't take an IT genius to set it up. As a matter of fact, most external drives even come with software to automate the process, for those that can't do it themselves.
Giving all of your data to nameless faceless people on the other side of the world is worse than not having any backups at all.
I started using CrashPlan last August and two months later got a bug that could only be fixed by reformatting the hard drive. I was VERY glad I had it then.
After years and years of backing things up on DVD and external hard drives (self employed graphic designer/illustrator) and keeping a copy off-premises every month - it was nice to just know that my work files were being backed up minutes after they were changed....as well as 100+GB of photographs.
It backs it up every time a work file changes....files I’d worked on the night before my computer quit working were backed up. This wouldn’t have happened if I was just backing up once a month.
I was careful about what I sent over there. No one would be interested much with all my work files or photos. Financial stuff I don’t back up there - still do my backups occasionally for that. Well worth $50 a year (which was passed onto a client who wanted the reassurance!)
CrashPlan is great. I looked into Carbonite but read way too many negative things about them.
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