Carbonite is a popular online backup program. Although this is a great piece of software and in general online backups are a terrific supplement to an onsite backup solution, there is something GoldMine Premium/Corporate Edition administrators should know. By default Carbonite does NOT backup files with a .BAK file extension. This is important for GoldMine Administrators to understand because database backups created by SQL Server are named with a .BAK extension. And although it is possible to override this Carbonite setting for a selected file, it cannot be done at the folder level. Since the names of your SQL backup files change daily, this would quickly become unmanageable. The solution is to set your SQL maintenance plan to use a different extension, say .BUP or .BKP., just something other than .BAK.
Of course should you ever need to restore from one of those files you will have to rename it back to the standard .BAK extension that SQL expects. If you use some other online backup solution like Mozy, SOS, LiveDrive, etc… you should check with their documentation to see if they have a similar policy. And keep in mind that SQL backups can be rather large, so also make sure you have sufficient bandwidth to handle the uploads.
For those wanting to know, here are the files and directories that are excluded.
“The following folders are excluded from Carbonite backups:
“%WINDIR%\*”,
“%TEMP%\*”,
“%TMP%\*”,
“\Recycler\*”,
“\Recycle Bin\*”,
“\System Volume Information\*”,
“\MSOCache\*”,
“\I386\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\*”, // skipped because most of this is system configuration stuff
“\Documents and Settings\*\Cookies\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Local Settings\History\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Local Settings\Temp*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\NetHood\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\PrintHood\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\History\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\NTUSER.DAT”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\*\Cache\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile\cache*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Application Data\Microsoft\CryptnetUrlCache\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Application Data\Yahoo! Desktop Search\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Application Data\Microsoft Help\*”,
“\Documents and Settings\*\Application Data\Carbonite\*”,
“\Program Files\Carbonite\Carbonite Backup\*”,
“\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Clipart\*”,The following file types are excluded from Carbonite backups:
.bak;.log;.cab;.cf1;.chm;.com;.cpl;.dll;.dmp;.drv;.evt;.exe;.inf;.ico;.iso;.jar;.lex;.lib;.msi;.msm;
.mst;.ocx;.otf;.pnf;.pf;.prn;.reg;.rll;.swf;.sys;.ttf;.tmp;.vxd;.chq;.chw;.hlp;.hxi;.hxq;
.hxr;.hxs;.abf;.afm;.bdf;.dfont;.eot;.fnt;.fon;.lwfn;.otf;.pfa;.pfb;.pfm;.suit;.ttc;.ttf;.ani;.ann;
.bmk;.cnt;.cpl;.cur;.dev;.drv;.dvd;.ffa;.ffl;.ffo;.ffx;.ftg;.fts;.gid;.grp;.idx;.img;
.ini;.ins;.ipf;.isp;.its;.kbd;.kext;.key;.msc;.msp;.nt;.plist;.pol;.pref;.prf;.pwl;.reg;
.scf;.scr;.sdb;.swp;.sys;.theme;.vga;.vgd;.vxd;.fxp;.jse;.obs;.prg;.rox;.shb;
.tms;.vbe;.wpk;.$$$;.$db;.113;.abk;.bac;.bck;.bcm;.bdb;.bkf;.bkp;.old;.rdb;
.win;.PCH;.SBR;.PDB;.OBJ;.BSC;.ILK;.NCB;.IDB;.v2i;.ost;.lnk;.vhd;.vmc;.vmdk;.vmsd;.vmx;.vmsn;system/;dtSearch*;Intermediate *;VMWare*;Virtual PC*;Virtual Machine*
Additionally, music and video files are excluded during free trial subscriptions of Carbonite.
Files that end in “_” or “~” don’t get “Back this up” option in context menu. It means it’s a compressed system file. It can be renamed (from the command line) to an extension w/out the “_” (underscore)or the “~”(tilde) and then you will get the backup option.”
Make sure that the files you want to be backed up are not included in the above exclusions.
