Carbonite is an online backup tool. And very good it is too. It sits silently in the background, backing up data from fixed disks (note, therefore, that removable or network drives can’t be used). You can unlimited storage for about £25 a year.

And PC Pro agrees.

At the moment I’m still in the trial period (you get 14 days to try it out) and there have been problems this week - namely a maintenance update by the Carbonite company has caused lots of issues with peoples backups. And that includes me. 3 times within 24 hours I had to re-install Carbonite and run a patch from their website. They didn’t tell you about this problem - just a message on their support page (would an email not have helped?).

Now, it’s all working. But with a side effect. The padlock icon which stays in the taskbar is permanently green. Before this changed colour depending on the state of the backup - amber to indicate files still needing backing up and green was 100% backup. At the time I only had 67% of files backed up and it remained green no matter what.

I contacted Carbonite who didn’t explain why this had happened but instead told me all the other ways to find out if backups were complete - none of which are as simple as simply glancing at the taskbar icon.

It’s full marks for the product but none for the quality of support so far.

IE8 got un-installed

It breaks Microsoft Money. And for someone in the midst of changing bank accounts, it was rather important that Money worked.

I’ve also resigned my FireFly to a drawer. It was just too slow. But nothing against that particular products - most USB keys are too slow when compared to an external hard drive such as my Passport.

But the days of the FireFly are not over… more will be revealed in time.

My good friend Ruth was a young 30 last week and we all went out on Saturday night to - and you can tell she must be a good friend - a vegetarian restaurant.

Now, I’m not averse to vegetables. I just like them to accompany a good piece of meat (or fish). So, with another good friend, Dufty, we devised a plan. We will open our own restaurant. A carnivore restaurant named “We’ll Meat Again”. The only vegetable allowed will be potato (for chips). It will be meat, meat, meat and pudding. And we’ll site it across the road from a vegetarian restaurant so pale-faced people can get their fix.

Since that discussion I think “Would Like to Meat” would be an even better name.

And if that fails, I think my plans for a meat-based perfume would be a winner.

Look at that. I’d like to say it’s to scale, but depending on your screen size and resolution, it probably won’t be. But it’s my latest purchase - an 8Gb (yes, you read that right) USB memory stick, called the JumpDrive FireFly. And just £18.

It’s a touch slow compared to my Passport, but then it’s likely to be - an actual hard drive does tend to be rather quick. Never-the-less it’s middling compared to my other USB sticks (slower than my Samsung but faster than my Crucial). Reviews say the write speed is slow, but then I’ve seen more recent ones that say otherwise. I can’t tell. I just know it’s slower than the passport, but still eminently usable.

I’ve also given up on onlinememory - in all senses. Phones and emails have all gone unanswered, so I’ve bought the Sansa from Play.com. I’ve also picked up a travel kit (including leather case) and memory expansion whilst I’m at it (that will bring it up to 10Gb in total). Nice.

Before, I talked about installing the beta of Internet Explorer 8 for website test purposes. Unfortunately, and I covered this also, it doesn’t sit with existing IE installations, unlike Firefox which you simply install into a seperate folder.

Now, and this comes from experience, all may not go well when two Firefox installations try to share a profile - particularly if one of those Firefox installations may break add-ons. So, having installed IE8 I thought it was only right to also try out the current beta of Firefox 3.

So, my workaround for this is to ensure you have seperate profiles and that each version of Firefox definitely uses the one it should do. Here’s what I did…

• Find your existing Firefox installation folder - usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox - and open up a command window
• Run firefox.exe -ProfileManager - the profile window will appear
• Ensure your current profile is named something appropriate. I changed it from default to David
• I then created a new profile named Test and closed the profile window down.
• Now change your current Firefox shortcut so that it specifically launches your original profile. In my case, this was "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P "David"
• I now downloaded the Beta 4 of Firefox 3.
• Run the downloaded program and select Custom installation - ensure it installs into a different folder than your current Firefox application. In this case it defaulted to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 4
• Once installed, de-select the option to launch the new Firefox installation.
• Find the new shortcut and change this to point to your newly created second profile. In my case this was, "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 4\firefox.exe" -P "Test"

And that’s it. Each version of Firefox will launch with it’s own profile and you can tinker about with your Beta installation all you like without affecting your normal browser profile.