No, not the stuff that Han Solo was frozen in.

I'm talking about the online, remote backup service, Carbonite.com. It just saved me from losing tons of information from my main hard drive.

Yesterday started off well enough, but sometime in the afternoon my hard drive began clicking. It's a very old drive so I knew what that sound meant. The clicking became more and more frequent until finally my computer "blue screened" and was out. I then powered down, unplugged it, and opened the case to remove the dead hard drive.

About 20 minutes later I had a replacement drive in place and a Windows XP installation disc in my CDROM drive. When that finished, I got online, went to Carbonite's website, logged in and reinstalled their software. Within minutes my old files began to populate my new drive.

There was a delay overnight because my router refreshed its client list and apparently didn't let my computer back in (probably because of the new operating system install), but before I left for work this morning the last of my files had been returned to my computer. I then switched from the recovery mode to the backup mode and let Carbonite begin ensuring my new hard drive against failure.

I'm not getting paid to post this. I just want to recommend Carbonite because it just saved me a lot of time and money - all that Forex stuff I posted about yesterday... it's all managed by spreadsheets I've hand written that would be gone right now if not for Carbonite. It's about $55 a year for this service, or roughly $4.58 a month. That's cheap insurance, especially since it really works.