Carbonite backup caused BSOD on Win 7 64

UPDATE: In retrospect, it’s probable that the BSODs were not Carbonite’s fault, but due to a bad drive. No impugning of Carbonite was intended 🙂 My apologies to the Carbonite staff who are not reading this post anyway.

I installed Carbonite as part of my backup strategy for PREFECT, and started experiencing all sorts of issues – my system would slow down, freeze, become glacial, and even on occassion do a BSOD. I didnt realize it was Carbonite at first – started wondering if I had damaged the CPU while installed the cooler, or somesuch – but eventually realized the culprint when my router fortuitously lost a connection, causing Carbonite to disable itself on reboot of the system when no network could be detected. The system became much more functional immediately, so i uninstalled it. Again, fortuitously, I had a BSOD immediately afterwards and the XML log indicated Carbonite as the culprit. I’ve uninstalled it now and am running a memory diagnostic, after which I’ll throw Prime95 at it for good measure. I am not 100% positive Carbonite was responsible for the general system instabilities, but the evidence it caused a BSOD was undeniable (see here for my post at Technet support forums).

I don’t see much else out there about others having issues with Carbonite on W764, so it could just be my unique environment. I am running Dropbox and Live Mesh, so maybe all these cloud services don’t play nicely with each other? I’m not sure. I’ll give Mozy a shot instead; some advantages of Mozy are monthly billing instead of annual (though no 15-day free trial period like Carbonite), and also they will mail you DVDs if you need to do a full restore (never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck carrying DAT tapes, as the legend goes).

At some point I should post all my benchmarks for PREFECT – if I can get these issues sorted out, this machine should be a real beast by all measures.

(Though why my memory usage is at 21% after boot with no apps running, I am not exactly clear… I’ve got 8 GB on here for MATLAB!)