Last week, a user posted on her blog: Are there any real advantages to a Windows Home Server other than remote access and backing up multimedia?

One respondent said it was just a "NAS with a fancy menu." Even though the blogger already has Carbonite, a NAS or some kind of local or network backup can make some sense. I don’t see Home Server as competition. I see it as complimentary.

I was recently talking to one of our users who was concerned that his initial backup was taking too long. Turns out he had over 200GBs of TV shows that he'd recorded and he was backing them up on Carbonite. Using his DSL connection, it's probably going to take him several months to back up all that stuff and meanwhile his business documents (Word and Excel primarily) are waiting in the queue and could be lost if his computer crashed in the meantime. When I asked him how important the TV shows were, his answer was "I really don't care about the TV shows. If I lost them, it wouldn't be the end of the world."

My suggestion: If there are REALLY BIG files that have relatively low value, back them up locally. If you have small files that are high value, back them up on Carbonite. When the important files are safe and sound, then you can back up the other stuff. Most people never bother to learn how to select what they do and don't want to back up with Carbonite. It's pretty simple (just right click on the folder with the TV shows and select Carbonite – don't back this up). Local backup, of course, is a lot faster than backing up over the Internet. But, as you can see from the post about my son's fire, local backup does have certain limitations.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Microsoft announced yesterday that they were "throwing in the towel" on their Live OneCare service which included a backup service. According to the web site, "data are continuously protected—automatically backed up on-schedule to a single location I specify."

This announcement comes on the heels of AOL shuttering its xDrive backup service and several smaller competitors biting the dust. Meanwhile Carbonite continues to grow at double-digit month-over-month rates. And we think at least one of our "pure play" competitors is also enjoying substantial growth. So what's going on here?

I think it's a matter of focus. Some vendors seem to think that backing up your PC isn't enough. You ought to throw in anti-virus, firewall, syncing PCs and mobile devices, sharing photos with friends and family, and many other "features." Most of these products seem to be dead or on life support.

Everyone knows they should be backing up their PCs. It's a big and immediate problem. Most of these other features are things that the user already has or are simply a "nice to have" for some subset of users (often younger users who tend to not want to pay for such things). When you have all these other features to sell, it dilutes the important message that you need to be backing up your computer. And because most of them have so many features to support, they don't do a particularly good job at any of them. We're content just to do a spectacularly good job at backup (if I do say so myself). In five years, I believe half the world's PCs will be backing up online. If we want to continue to be number one in this market, we really have to focus and do a better job than anyone else.

I think Microsoft has found that their expertise at writing software does not automatically translate into an ability to run a rock-solid backup service. When we were out raising our first rounds of venture capital a couple of years ago, I was told repeatedly by investors that Microsoft was going to enter this market and crush us. What has been demonstrated time and again is that if you focus on doing one job exceptionally well and if you're motivated to the point where you’re life depends on it, no big corporation can keep you down.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I read a blog post from Australia today hinting that Google may be getting into the backup business. Actually, what this article says is, "Online backup services allow people to use the internet like a hard drive." Those are their words, not ours. Carbonite thinks backup is a lot more than just disk space in the cloud.

Think about the problem you’re trying to solve: Tomorrow you might wake up and find out that your hard drive has crashed and everything on your PC is gone. Or maybe you’re like me and you leave your laptop in a taxi in NY and watch in frustration as it disappears around the corner forever. Or maybe you’ve been working on that big presentation for the last week and at the last minute you do something dumb and erase it.

There have been rumours about Google and Microsoft getting into the backup business for more than a year. Microsoft finally unveiled their entry called Windows Live SkyDrive. Google’s rumoured "G-drive" has yet to appear, but we’re guessing it will be similar to Sky Drive – less about automated backup and more about collaboration, file sharing, and storing a limited number of active documents in the cloud. It will not be free. Like SkyDrive, you’ll get a certain amount of space for free, and you’ll have to pay for more. Compared with Carbonite, it will be expensive for most users. It will not encrypt your data because encrypting make sharing applications nearly impossible. And it won’t automatically back up everything on your PC as we do. You’ll have to make a lot of choices and think about it each time.

Our idea of backup is that it should be like buying car insurance – once you purchase it, you put it in the drawer until disaster strikes. The less intrusive it is, the better. The one feature of SkyDrive that I like is the ability to access a backed up file remotely in an emergency. I was recently on a business trip and forgot to bring a file that I had on my home computer. It would have been nice to get it from my home computer’s Carbonite backup. We’ve figured out a way to do this that preserves the encryption and security of Carbonite’s backup, and I am hoping we can get this feature into a release later this year.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite