carbonite

All posts tagged carbonite

Carbonite customer service?

Posted by Photonstopper on January 15, 2009
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , , . 2 Comments

Carbonite's automatic, online, off-site backup service came highly recommended by tech media legend Leo Laporte, which is why we purchased a one-year subscription. Most anecdotal information indicates the backup and restore work fine. I have learned, however, that there are also many reports of little or no customer service when a difficulty is encountered.

One of the first places I checked for a solution to last weekend's Carbonite BSOD situation (Blue Screen Of Death) was the Carbonite site. I found no reference to such an issue there, no weekend contact hours, and only an email "customer service" form available on their Web site — so I used it.

It's Thursday and I've yet to hear back from Carbonite. Fortunately I was able to discover the resolution to my issue (see previous post) as published by fellow Carbonite users, independent of that company. My issue was well-documented, there was a relatively easy solution that was also well-documented, so why wasn't that solution posted and available on the Carbonite site?

The incident, and Carbonite's lack of response to me and to others, is a clear indicator to me that there is something wrong with Carbonite's attitude towards technical support and customer service, qualities that should be core to a company whose business it is to protect our precious data.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Acronis/Carbonite issue solved!

Posted by Photonstopper on January 11, 2009
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , . 3 Comments

The computer of She Who Must Be Obeyed was working fine yesterday and today so I decided to reinstall Carbonite and resume Her backups. No sooner did re-installation complete than Windows XP gave up the ghost with the all-too-familiar Blue Screen of Death (BSOD): BAD_POOL_HEADER …. STOP:0X00000019.

After uninstalling Carbonite –again– in Windows Safe Mode, I resumed my online search with a little better focus: Carbonite was somehow directly involved in the issue. After a couple of variations I finally tried Carbonite BSOD as Google search terms. There, among the search results was a description of our issue complete with THE SOLUTION! It seems some other poor saps had also cloned/migrated their Carbonite-protected hard drive using an Acronis product and had the same BSODs as our computer experienced. Thank goodness those who solved the problem posted the solution to their forum!

The solution (found here) involved these steps:

  1. Go to Windows Device Manager
  2. Click "view" and select "show hidden devices"
  3. Scroll down to "storage volumes"
  4. Click on the plus to expand.
  5. Click on each one listed and right click and uninstall. (you will get a message on some saying to reboot before it takes effect. Select no until you do them all.)
  6. Reboot.
  7. Wait till windows automatically reinstalls devices. Will prompt to reboot again.
  8. Reboot.

I knew it had to be some persistent file or process but had no idea what it was or where to find it. Following the prescribed steps I then reinstalled Carbonite and watched breathlessly as the hard drive began accesses similar to those that had led to crashes. No crash! Carbonite completed its updating file scan and began its backup work. Success! What a relief.

Now, I don't know why Carbonite got messed up or whether Windows Indexing Service was implicated. Apparently the same thing has happened to people who have used Retrospect to back up and restore. And what a strange set of circumstances. Sometimes even good software doesn't work or play well together and I guess this is one of those cases. I am, however, feeling much better about things but worry… how much more grief would have been suffered by someone with less knowledge and experience than have I ? I don't want to even think about that one… but the software producers ought to!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Just try and do something nice!

Posted by Photonstopper on January 10, 2009
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

ALERT: This one is pretty geeky but, well, look who's writing it….

Crashed Again!
Crashed Again!

I spent a good part of my day off yesterday making what should have been a routine group of upgrades to the computer of She Who Must Be Obeyed. One of her Christmas gifts was an upgrade copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional –yes, that what She really wanted– but when the time came for Yours Truly to install the package we got an unpleasant surprise. Unbeknownst to us, the free space on her PC's original equipment 30-gigabyte hard drive had shrunk to only a few GBs and the upgrade would not install. So we purchased a nice new 80 GB drive for her. Yes, bigger drives are available for the same money, but it's my opinion that they are less reliable than the more modestly-sized units.

Now, how to transfer the operating system and all those nice applications and files… Cloning was the answer and, after much research, I found an excellent home solution in Acronis Migrate Easy. I know, IT is my business and my fellow geeks might look down their noses at an easy, commercial solution. But IT is my business, not my hobby, and I didn't want the bother of the many other home-brew cloning processes and solutions; I just wanted to get the job done and on the first try.

So I installed the new drive; purchased, downloaded, and installed the Acronis package; and ran it. It was easy as pie and maybe easier — crusts can be a pain. I was able to just click through the setup screens, tell it to start, and walk away. It didn't run as fast as I expected but, after four hours the process was complete. I removed the original drive and the PC booted up perfectly. I was delighted. So I went about installing the Christmas gift, installing Microsoft updates, and finally defragging the hard drive — there wasn't enough space on the old drive to do that before cloning. After those hours of work, all seemed well and I was ready to proclaim success to SWMBO until I rebooted and was presented with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death in the late afternoon. Too many changes, too many actions to know what happened to the poor Dell Dimension to make it so sick!

BAD_POOL_HEADER …. STOP:0X00000019 the screen announced (in part). So I did some other diagnostic and utility stuff including scandisk, with the /f /r switches, but still was getting blue screens. Lots of thinking and searching indicated a leading cause was the Windows Indexing Service, or device drivers, or new software. I shut off indexing and still the computer crashed. Troubleshooting went on well into the night with a long break for Monk and Psych. This morning I continued my efforts first by disabling the Indexing Service, then restarting… a step I had not done the night before. Ah-ha! The system was stable. It ran until I tried starting the Carbonite online backup service which I had disabled for the cloning; I got an immediate Blue Screen! I uninstalled Carbonite (I hated doing that but it made sense.), rebooted, and the system was stable again. Hmmmm….  finally we can get into some computer science experiments!

So with the computer stable all morning I restored the Windows Indexing Service after lunch. Soon the hard drive began to rattle as it had previously just before each crash. This time, however, the system stayed "up" and remained usable. My conclusion, after all this, is that the index file had been damaged during the transfer and my efforts (mostly leaving the Indexer disabled for some time) resulted in the Service rebuilding the corrupted file. I don't, by the way, blame Acronis which I still think is an excellent product –especially for home PC users who are migrating to a single new hard drive.

Tomorrow or early next week I'll reinstall Carbonite and see what happens. I expect things will be just fine now, after all this stress and effort. That's how it goes, though… just try and do something nice!

Oh, and it snowed about a foot over the past 24 hours.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend