After lots of discussions with our small business users, we're happy to say that the product they've been asking for — Carbonite Pro — has arrived! We think it does a great job of meeting the needs of the various business owners and managers — especially with regards to being simple to use and a great value.

First, unlike the Carbonite you're used to where you get unlimited backup of one PC, Carbonite Pro lets you back up an unlimited number of PCs. There is just one account to manage and protect all the PCs in your office.

Then, since most small businesses don't have a full time IT person, we designed Carbonite Pro so virtually any office administrator can easily use it. Everything is in plain English (no confusing technical terms) and the dashboard is simple to use.

With Carbonite Pro, there's no per-computer charge and you only pay for the amount of backup space you use. And pricing is based on a simple tiered system.

You may not have any idea how much space your company needs and that's why we provide a month free. Throughout the month, you can use the dashboard to see how much space your company is using. You can also see the amount of storage used by each employee. So if someone gets carried away and backs up some very large files, you'll see it.

There are lots more easy-to-use features in Carbonite Pro. To add a new user, just enter the person's email address and Carbonite will send that user a pre-authorized link to install Carbonite Pro. In fact, the user doesn't even have to be in the office to set up Carbonite Pro. (Sales teams and others who are always on the road or who work at home will love it.) And what if one of your employees leaves the company? It's easy to immediately freeze that employee's account, stop any unauthorized downloading from the backup, and re-assign access of those files to someone else.

I could go on and on about the numerous benefits of Carbonite Pro, but we all know that a hands-on trial is the best way to see whether the product is right for you. So, if you’re a small business, just go to CarbonitePro.com and sign up for our free trial.

I absolutely believe you'll find Carbonite Pro very easy to use and the most cost effective online backup solution on the market. When you try it, please let me know how you like it.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

We all know about hard drive crashes and theft, but the following article that appeared a couple of months ago in Techworld totally blew me away. I'm not completely surprised by the spilled food statistic (I remember one of my kids giving me her "dead" laptop. "Zoe, why does your laptop smell like beer?"), but the rage thing was news to me.

One in ten portables downed by 'laptop rage'

Paul Boutin, The Industry Standard20 April 2009

“

A significant portion of damage to laptops is caused by the "anger or frustration" that employees take out on them, a study has found.

That is one of the findings of a new study entitled "Business Risk of a Lost Laptop." It was published last Wednesday by the Ponemon Institute and is funded by Dell, which is using the study to tout its data encryption and recovery solutions.

The report, described by Ponemon as a web-based survey of 3,100 IT and security practitioners located in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Mexico and Brazil, found that laptop-smashing employees were cited as the leading cause of damage by one in three respondents in Mexico and Brazil.

The Brits are more reserved: Only 6 percent of UK respondents blamed angry staff. Instead, travel-related damage caused by not taking proper care of the laptop leads among the British, with just over half of UK respondents claiming it was the most common cause of damage.

Americans rate laptop rage and mishandling on the road fairly low - 13 percent and 25 percent, respectively. Instead, 34 percent of American IT pros told Ponemon that "spilling food or liquids on the laptop" is the top cause of damage. But before you roll your eyes at ugly Americans, take note: An even higher 36 percent voted food spills the top problem among the French."

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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

We know our users love us, but will they vote for us? That is the question.

We get plenty of fan mail from users whose data we saved — we restore over 10 million files every month. That's a lot of saved bacon. But do they love us enough to give us their vote?

Every year, CNET runs the prestigious Webware 100 contest — really an industry popularity contest where users get to vote for their favorite applications. Over 5,000 companies got nominated by readers of CNET's Webware site. In the end there were only 300 finalists. And after 630,000 votes, only 100 winners. Carbonite was one of them. So thanks to all of you CNET readers out there who voted for Carbonite. You didn't let us down, and we will never let you down!

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I would like to further clarify two points with regard to Carbonite’s lawsuit against Promise Technologies:

1) This event happened over a year ago. We do not say this to minimize the matter. But we do want to point out that this has not happened in a long time and is not an ongoing problem.

2) The total number of Carbonite customers who were unable to retrieve their data was 54, not 7,500.

Here is what happened: The Promise servers that we were purchasing in 2006 and 2007 use RAID technology to spread data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don't lose any data. The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as "firmware" in the storage servers. In this case, we believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs that caused the servers to crash. Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups and more than 99% of these were completely restored without incident. Statistically, about 2 out of every 1,000 consumer hard drives will crash every week, so 54 of these customers had their PCs crash before their re-started backups were complete. Since they weren’t completely backed up when their PCs crashed, these customers were unable to restore all of their files from Carbonite. Most of the 54 got some or most of their data back. We took full responsibility for what happened and I did my best to call each of these customers personally to apologize.

As a result of our problems with the Promise servers, we switched to a popular Dell server that uses RAID6 – an improved RAID that allows for the loss of 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously before you lose any data. This configuration is in theory 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive — the chances of 3 out of 15 drives failing at the same time are almost nil.

So far, Promise has refused to accept responsibility for their equipment’s failures, so now we are suing them to get our money back. The Dell RAID servers have been flawless and we're extremely happy with them. Dave Friend, CEOCarbonite, Inc.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

On March 21, The Boston Globe reported that Carbonite is suing Promise Technologies, a company that makes storage servers that we purchased back in 2007. This lawsuit stems from an incident that occurred over a year ago. The article (and subsequent coverage by other outlets) references court documents which say that Carbonite "lost the backups of over 7,500 customers." It is possible that readers will walk away from this with the impression that 7,500 customers were unable to restore their files from Carbonite. This is not the case. Let me explain.

All of the affected customers had their backups re-started immediately and automatically. Statistically, about 2 out of every 1000 hard drives will crash every week (about the time it took to get most customers backed up again), so a small number of these customers had their PCs crash before their re-started backups were complete. These customers were unable to restore all of their files from Carbonite. We took full responsibility for what happened, and I did my best to apologize personally to each of these customers.

For the techies who are reading this, what happened is this: The Promise servers use a technology called "RAID" that spreads data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don't lose any data. In fact, the kind of RAID we use allows us to lose 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously before you lose any data. This configuration is in theory 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive — the chances of 3 out of 15 drives failing at the same time are almost nil. The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as "firmware" in the storage servers that we buy. In this case, the firmware had bugs that caused the whole server to crash.

So that, in a nutshell, is what we allege in our lawsuit. We were sold defective equipment and hence have asked Promise to refund our money. So far they have refused to accept responsibility, so now we are suing them. The Dell RAID servers that we started purchasing a couple of years ago have been flawless and we're extremely happy with them.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Here's some moderately big news in the online backup industry: HP has decided to discontinue their HP Upline service. HP got into this business by buying a company called Opelin. They spent about a year fixing the product up before launching it as HP Upline. I tried the service when it first came out and found it to be a little complicated for the average consumer. Only a few days later, they experienced an embarrassing outage where the whole service went down for several days. This was followed by a string of other software failures.

I'm not sure what HP was thinking when they decided to get into this business in the first place. They aren't in the antivirus business. They're not in the operating system or firewall business. What made them think that they could build and operate a world-class online backup service?

Everyone thinks that building an online backup service is easy. When I was raising money for Carbonite, one venture capitalist waved me off saying, "Any engineering team could design a product like that in a couple of weeks." When I was teaching at MIT seven or eight years ago, one of my students was fuming about Google's success, saying "Anyone can write a search engine. What's the big deal with these guys?" Maybe so, but writing a search engine that can process tens of thousands of searches per second against a database that is bigger than all the world's libraries combined is not so easy.

Same thing holds for online backup. We have 60 man years of development in the platform that stores your data. Data comes pouring into our data centers at a rate of about 100 million files every day, or 70,000 files every minute around the clock. The software and architecture that allows all that data to get onto our redundant storage arrays without losing even one byte is incredibly complicated. So while it's easy to back up one PC with one external hard drive, backing up many hundreds of thousands of PCs that are all simultaneously sending you data from every corner of the earth, is quite another matter.

I can understand why HP would want to put online backup on their PCs – when an HP PC fails and you lose all your wedding pictures, you are probably going to be mad at HP, not at the people who make the hard drive inside the PC. But I don't understand why HP wanted to own a service like this in the first place. They get their antivirus and other services from 3rd party vendors, and they should have done the same with online backup. I guess they learned it isn't as easy as it looks.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Think backing up to DVDs is a good idea? Not in the opinion of David Pogue, the technology columnist for the New York Times. I hadn't thought about this, but holy smokes! Here's an excerpt from his Dec. 10th post:

“

Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I've got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn't big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.) Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD's were unreadable. They're less than four years old! … I know, of course, that home-burned DVD's, which rely on organic dye that deteriorates with time, are nowhere near as long-lived as commercially pressed discs. But man. Four years? Scared the bejeezus out of me. I've been told by experts that the gold DVD blanks can indeed last 100 years. Guess I'll be trying that next!

So even if you can find the DVDs (would surely be a problem in my messy office) and they don't get scratched or destroyed, they may just be completely unreadable. Another reason to back up online.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Earlier this week I had gotten a note from one of our employees about the recent fires in Santa Barbara, CA. 230 houses burned down. All the people who thought they had their data backed up on CDs, DVDs, and external hard drives lost everything.

Then it happened in my own family. My son's house in Cambridge, MA was completely gutted by fire yesterday. Here's the story on Boston.com. He was awakened by a neighbor pounding on his door and discovered smoke seeping from the floor boards under his bed. Moments later the house was completely engulfed in flames. He got out barefoot in his pajamas. His mac with all his professional work was vaporized, as was his external hard drives that he used for backup. I am kicking myself for not getting him onto our mac beta, but he was waiting for the production release next month.

Believe me, this kind of thing is not an abstract possibility. It actually happens all the time, and when you think about what you've lost, it makes you sick.

Update 12/12/08: Here's a photo of the fire that was sent to me by a friend who lives a fews streets away.

— 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