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.

Summary of Carbonite

For backing up your computer to the internet Carbonite is second-to-none. For customer service, I’m not yet sure

Reviewed by David Artiss on 22nd March 2008.

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.

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 from MyMemory.

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.