Those of you with laptops ought to read this CNN article about some of the hazards of traveling with your laptop. The biggest risk, of course, is damage. I have probably seen at least a half dozen laptops fall out of overhead compartments over the years. Then theft — Lenovo says that about 10% of all laptops get stolen or lost, most while traveling. Then there are absent minded people like me who leave them on the planes, trains, and (worse) taxis. (Last time I left one in a taxi, the driver found my name and called me a half hour later with an offer to make a special trip back with my laptop for a mere $500. He must have been about two blocks away because he got there in a couple of minutes. That's New York.) The CNN article also mentions the possibility of virus infections and malware courtesy of the public WiFi networks. I hadn't thought about this threat, but I guess it's yet another hazard.

The author doesn't really appreciate what a great solution online backup is for laptop owners. It's so much better than local backups. You don't have to lug around external hard drives or other equipment. When you are connected to the Internet, Carbonite just goes to work wherever you are. I know that the times I've lost laptops, at least I knew that I was backed up almost to the minute.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

According to a recently released survey by Compuware, most data loss is attributable to either user negligence or malice. Only 1% of data loss is due to hackers. I loved the headline on this story: "3/4 idiots, 1/4 bitterness."

I have to confess to being part of the "idiot" crowd. Three weeks ago I left my laptop sitting on my seat when I got off the train in New York. I remembered it just in time to see my train, with laptop still aboard, disappearing down the track. Except for occasionally recovering individual files that I accidentally delete or overwrite, I haven't actually had a PC disaster since starting Carbonite 3 years ago. So, aside from the pain of having to buy a new laptop, it was fun to use my own product to get everything back. I was really proud of how well it worked.

What I don't see in the Compuware survey is data lost to hard drive failure. For some reason this doesn't show up in the survey, even though I will bet you that it tops all the other categories. We use a LOT of hard drives in our data center, and our statistics show that roughly 3% of all hard drives will fail each year. That's why we use RAID arrays which are 36 million times more reliable than a single drive. Google also publishes their disk failure rate, and it's roughly the same as ours. Hard drives are a data disaster waiting to happen, in our experience. That's why you need a LOT of redundancy in your data storage architecture, as we do. We store our customers' encrypted data on 16 drive arrays. We would have to lose 3 of the 16 drives simultaneously AND your PC would have to crash all at the same time before any data is lost. When you figure the odds of this happening, it's very very close to zero.

I hope you never leave your laptop on Amtrak, but if you do, you'll be glad you've got Carbonite.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

A friend of mine sent me this picture. If only she had had Carbonite!

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite