I read an interesting article on Yahoo news this morning: 1 in 3 laptops die in the first three years.

The survey, conducted by SquareTrade, a warranty company, highlighted the following statistics: Looking at the first 3 years of ownership, 31% of laptop owners reported a failure to SquareTrade. Two-thirds of this failure (20.4%) came from hardware malfunctions, and one-third (10.6%) was reported as accidental damage. The complete report is available here: http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf

These findings correlate quite well with the actual behavior of our users: approximately 11% of our users have to do a full restore of their data each year. Over three years, that's almost exactly the same 33% number. Another interesting statistic from our own user base is that almost half of all users do a partial restore each year — mostly to recover accidentally deleted or overwritten files.

I'll bet that if you asked the average computer user what the likelihood is of their computer data getting destroyed, they would guess a much lower number. Having a 1 in 3 chance that you are going to lose everything on your PC only highlights why online backup is so important.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

The Sunday New York Times had this little story regarding one of the passengers on the US Air flight that crashed into the Hudson River:

“

When US Airways Flight 1549 went into the Hudson River last month, it gave William Wiley, an engineer at Software Associates, a new meaning for the term "computer crash."

Mr. Wiley was on his way home to Johnson, Tenn., from the company's headquarters on Long Island. He had years of work on his laptop, carefully backed up on another laptop — but both were on the plane with him.

Now the two laptops are among approximately 50,000 passenger items that a mortuary company has frozen, in refrigerated trucks, to preserve them until they can be dried, cleaned and returned to their owners."

Good luck getting the data back from a wet and frozen hard drive.

This particular situation is not likely to happen to anyone, but you can imagine innumerable similar circumstances. The more frequent event is that someone breaks into your house or car and steals your computer and the external backup drive sitting next to it. We hear stories like that all the time.

In any event, the US Air story, like the California wildfire stories last Fall, all mount up to a compelling reason to backup online where the data is safe from all these hazards.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I'm sure that many of you have read that HP’s online backup service went down shortly after it was introduced. It’s back up now, and HP has explained that what they experienced was a "technical glitch." Here are a few links about this story:

Enterprise Storage Forum: HP Upline Suffers Downtime

InformationWeek: HP Shuts Down Online Storage Service

Beta News: Bringing down the cloud: HP's Upline down for a third of its life

Why am I blogging about HP’s problems? Only because it underscores the difficulty of building a reliable large scale backup service.

When I was out raising money for Carbonite, one venture capitalist dismissed backup as a "trivial" application. It reminded me of an incident when I was teaching at MIT a few years ago: one of my students insisted that Google wasn't worth billions of dollars because "anyone can write a search engine." It’s true. But Google's barrier to entry is their huge scale. To build a backup service that can flawlessly store and retrieve billions of files is not so easy, as HP has learned.

When we first started out, we were using Microsoft’s NTFS file system. When we got to about 500 million files, it started to crash and gave us all kinds of problems. When we called Microsoft for help, the engineer on the other end asked us how many files we were storing. When we said "about 500 million", there was silence on the other end of the phone. He said "Uh, well we didn’t really design NTFS for that many files." So we set about building our own proprietary file system that could handle more than a trillion files, because that’s where we’ll be in a couple of years. We currently receive almost 40 million new files every day. And we have close to 7 billion files backed up. We restore millions of files every day.

To do all that without losing any data is an enormously complicated engineering challenge. We're three and a half years into this effort and there is no shortcut way to get to where we are, no matter how much money you throw at the problem. Our confidence in our own infrastructure is due to the fact that we’ve built a customer base of hundreds of thousands of users. Until a company does that, they’ll never know whether their systems are going to fall over. HP, with all their resources, is going through the same learning curve that we’ve gone through for the last 3 years.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite