PC crashed downloading Carbonite 1st time.

[AZ-Tax]

PC blue screen briefly appeared with message "unmountable volume boot". Tried pc's recovery disk but would not read. PC guy down street has chkdsk on it now for 30 hrs straight. Its been doing some cluster repairing on the way but it dragging. PC guy said it could be a week. Ok, grab kids pc, accessed my Carbonite back up and was able to view some needed files. Now I am downloading and this warning window comes up about every 5 mins asking me if I want to stay connected and if I dont answer within a min, its will disconnect. I got chatted with Carbonite and no way I can stop the window from appearing. Does MOZY or the those other online backups also have this warnng window appearing often? I have a file that is going to take about 30 mins to download and I would like to walk away from my pc.

[RLymanC]

Carbonite

I submitted your question to a long time computer tech, his responce is a follows:

Carbonite is an online backup service. Carbonite is a good service but they require you to be at your computer during the recovery / download phase if you ever have to do it. There are better alternatives out there which don't offer public internet hosting which - to me - is a big concern if a person is wanting to store critical files only without any public viewing capability. Too many times I've seen "what if" scenarios played-out in real life from a few hosting services whom did not have their securities set correctly.

The poster's issue with "unmountable volume boot" is more-than-likely indicative to either 1) a failing hard drive, or 2) power supply issues. Seldom are "unmountable boot volumes" caused by software conflicts though it is not unheard of.

If he has a failing hard drive then even if he downloads the file it may not save correctly; possibly fragmenting and/or having sections unreadable which may affect the opening of the file itself. Assuming, of course, this is a single contiguous document / excel spreadsheet /accounting backup / etc. and not a compressed volume containing multiple files.

[Gretel]

PC blue screen briefly appeared with message "unmountable volume boot". Tried pc's recovery disk but would not read. PC guy down street has chkdsk on it now for 30 hrs straight. Its been doing some cluster repairing on the way but it dragging. PC guy said it could be a week. Ok, grab kids pc, accessed my Carbonite back up and was able to view some needed files. Now I am downloading and this warning window comes up about every 5 mins asking me if I want to stay connected and if I dont answer within a min, its will disconnect. I got chatted with Carbonite and no way I can stop the window from appearing. Does MOZY or the those other online backups also have this warnng window appearing often? I have a file that is going to take about 30 mins to download and I would like to walk away from my pc.

I have restored files from my Mozy backup and don't recall any window popping up. However, I also don't recall how big the files were. Just call them. Mozy was recommended to me by someone who is very conservative to paranoid (his own words) when security and/or reliability is at stake.

Good luck.

[taxea]

PC blue screen briefly appeared with message "unmountable volume boot". Tried pc's recovery disk but would not read. PC guy down street has chkdsk on it now for 30 hrs straight. Its been doing some cluster repairing on the way but it dragging. PC guy said it could be a week. Ok, grab kids pc, accessed my Carbonite back up and was able to view some needed files. Now I am downloading and this warning window comes up about every 5 mins asking me if I want to stay connected and if I dont answer within a min, its will disconnect. I got chatted with Carbonite and no way I can stop the window from appearing. Does MOZY or the those other online backups also have this warnng window appearing often? I have a file that is going to take about 30 mins to download and I would like to walk away from my pc.

Check the option in your email program to see how often it checks for new mail. If it is more than three minutes reset it. Often sites think the computer is sitting idle and will shut down if it doesn't detect activity. Changing this option will keep the site up because your email program activity will keep the "internet connection" awake.

[AZ-Tax]

RlymanC, can you ask your computer tech the following

I submitted your question to a long time computer tech, his responce is a follows:

Carbonite is an online backup service. Carbonite is a good service but they require you to be at your computer during the recovery / download phase if you ever have to do it. There are better alternatives out there which don't offer public internet hosting which - to me - is a big concern if a person is wanting to store critical files only without any public viewing capability. Too many times I've seen "what if" scenarios played-out in real life from a few hosting services whom did not have their securities set correctly.

The poster's issue with "unmountable volume boot" is more-than-likely indicative to either 1) a failing hard drive, or 2) power supply issues. Seldom are "unmountable boot volumes" caused by software conflicts though it is not unheard of.

If he has a failing hard drive then even if he downloads the file it may not save correctly; possibly fragmenting and/or having sections unreadable which may affect the opening of the file itself. Assuming, of course, this is a single contiguous document / excel spreadsheet /accounting backup / etc. and not a compressed volume containing multiple files.

Well the tech guy has his "chkdsk" running on my pc for 4 days and on Thursday it just came to a complete halt . Purchased another HD. How if at all, could I have prevented this from happening to my PC?

[spanel]

Well the tech guy has his "chkdsk" running on my pc for 4 days and on Thursday it just came to a complete halt . Purchased another HD. How if at all, could I have prevented this from happening to my PC?

Nothing you could do to prevent a hard drive from crashing... its a mechical device and it WILL fail eventually... your best bet it to have good backups when the time comes.. not IF.


Chris

[BOB W]

In the future you could have a "Mirrored" Hardrive. This means that you have 2 hard drives writing the same info on each drive at the same time. If one goes bad your tech can change which drive is your startup drive and you are up and running within the hour. You will need to buy a new hard drive as your new "mirrored" drive.