If you’ve been curious about cloud backup but haven’t known where to start or want to keep your costs down, CrashPlan out of Minneapolis has a special going for folks who use Carbonite backup which gives them a year of free CrashPlan single computer backup which usually runs $49.99. Rick Broida at CNET wrote about this last month in his article CrashPlan offers Carbonite users a free year of cloud backup   “But Nerino you ask, I don’t use Carbonite so what good does this do me?”

Never fear, all you need to do is to sign up for the free trial at http://www.carbonite.com/en/v2/online-backup/free-trial and download the trial. Then go to https://www.crashplan.com/carboniteswitcher/ and enter the email address you used to sign up for the Carbonite trial. Through the magic of the internet ( or more likely that a cookie is left on your system but I haven’t confirmed it), CrashPlan verifies that you have a Carbonite account via your email address and you’re good to go. If you have a Gmail account you can create an alias email specifically for this task. For example, if your Gmail email address is bob@gmail.com you can create an alias by entering the following into the email box on Carbonite bob+carbonite@gmail.com (see http://www.ltnow.com/using-aliases-in-gmail/ for detailed instructions) . If you have more than one computer, rather than fee, you can sign up for up to 10 computers for $50.00. You can check out the lifehacker post on this as well here. 

 I’ve tried this and it works.

 Good luck young Jedi.