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[Here's a review of Carbonite, the online backup service, that I originally posted to my personal blog back when the wife and I were awaiting the arrival of our first child:]

So there’s no sign of the kid yet. In the meantime, we continue to prepare. And that means taking care of all the things you just don’t want to have to be dealing with later when you’re at the beck and call of a two-week-old child. But I’ll tell ya, we’re getting down to the bottom of the to-do list, the real dull stuff.

Take, for instance, task #436: Finally setting up a way to regularly back up the files on my laptop. Honestly, I’ve never gotten around to doing this until now, ever, on any computer — despite recommending it to every unfortunate friend, relative, and client who has ever called me in panic with complaints of a crashed hard drive.

I get why they — and I — don’t do what we all know we should: Backing up your hard drive is about as exciting as applying for life insurance. But since we crossed life insurance off the list last week…..

So to all my friends, relatives, and clients, here’s the deal: I’m now backing up my computer with Carbonite. It’s a subscription-based service that automatically and regularly copies your important files to a remote server (run by Carbonite.) If you accidentally delete a file, or your whole hard drive, you can get back the important stuff.

After you install the Carbonite utility, the software automatically does an initial backup of your My Documents folder. This part takes a few days, but it happens in the background while you’re computer’s on so you don’t really notice. After that, the software only sends copies of new or changed files to the server. (You can set which files get backed up and how often.)

The only problem I had with Carbonite is that I noticed my hard drive seemed to be running all the time, even after the initial backup was done. I think that’s because Carbonite was fighting to back up my email files every time I got a new message. My email is already backed up elsewhere, so I ended up removing the “AppData” folder from my backup schedule and that seems to have fixed things.

The whole thing costs $49.95 per year. But here’s a secret: Search for “Carbonite coupon” and you’ll likely find a $10 discount floating around out there.

So there you go — no more reason to panic and call me when you lose all those MP3s you ripped from the CDs you “borrowed” from me. And speaking of ripping MP3s, if the kid doesn’t show up within a few more days, I’ll tell you about boring task #437.