Recently my Carbonite back-up stopped working. Carbonite is one of the new breed of low-cost, on-line, continuous data back-up services. I have tried Mozy and Jungle Disk as well, and stick with Carbonite because I started with it, it works quietly and reliably, the control panel is simple, and its costs just $50 a year for unlimited storage.

Mozy has a Windows server versions offers something of a Mac version. Jungle Disk is even newer and cheaper based on Amazon S3 storage, and has more options. But Carbonite just chugs along on my XP laptop, gets to work wherever I have an Internet connection, and has not let me down when I have needed to restore a file.

And then Carbonite stopped. I didn't immediately go crazy about it because I also have a second back-up strategy. I also use a cheap external hard drive (Western Digital passports are the coolest) running Second Copy shareware software every night. For $30, Second Copy offers an amazing set of options in a really easy to get started with wizard format. And my critical files also sync with the server. But if you do keep files on your laptop, you need to have a personal back-up strategy. And for the costs today, it totally makes sense to use more than one form of back-up. And today it totally makes sense to think beyond traditional tape drives.

Anyhow, Carbonite stopped. It nicely told me it had stopped, and I also got mildly concerned automatic emails from Carbonite. I appreciated the concern and felt loved. When the software didn't respond to following the simple directions to reinstall and restart it, I contacted customer service. And honestly, for $50 a year, I didn't expect to get much personalized help.

I was wrong. Over the course of several days, I got very individualized attention. Not casually insulting stuff, like, is your computer powered on, or have you considered reformatting your hard drive. Instead, I was gracefully moved up the service hierarchy until "Mark" traced the problem to a conflict with an upgrade to my anti-virus software. All by email, no long dreary waits on the phone. Once I patched that and restarted the Carbonite back-up yesterday, all was well again. Very nice.

Let me know if you want to try Carbonite, but please do something.