Our Mac version of Carbonite is still pretty new, but we just got a very good review from 
Pocket-lint.com, a very influential news and review site.

The reviewer noted the ease of use, the simplicity of the restore process, and the unobtrusiveness of Carbonite when it's running. The author also points out some of the advantages of online backup over a local external hard drive using Time Machine. If you're a Mac user, you may want to take a look at this review.

Click here to read the full review.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Being a well-known technology guru is no guarantee that you're not going to get slammed with the same PC catastrophes that affect the rest of us. cNet's Don Reisinger learned this lesson after doing a demo on how to take apart your iMac and replace the hard drive. Long story short, after spending a significant amount of time and money, he ended up losing most of his files. Here's Don's conclusion for his readers: "I screwed up and it cost me money. Don't let this happen to you. Make sure you back up your files."

I consider myself to be pretty technically savvy, but a very similar thing happened to me back in 2005. In fact, it was a major factor in the decision to start Carbonite. Like most people, I had an external hard drive and every so often I would back up my PC to the hard drive. The problem, if you're like me, is that you do this religiously for a while, and then the backups get less and less frequent. I travelled a lot back then, and I didn't want to drag the hard drive on the road with me because I didn't want to lose it. When I was home, I was too tired or distracted to connect the hard drive and run a backup. When my hard drive finally crashed, I discovered that it had been three months since my last backup. Worse, I discovered that all the new folders that I had created since originally setting up the backup had not been added to the backup. So I lost nearly everything of value.

The reason I find online backup so compelling (I truly love it) is that it works ANYWHERE you connect to the Internet. So if I am sitting at Starbucks in the Dallas airport, Carbonite is backing up my work. And I don't know how many people are aware of this, but Carbonite was the first company to offer unlimited backup for a fixed price. The reason we went this route is so that the user wouldn't have to know where their files were stored to add them to their backup. The backup just happens automatically.

Ed Baig of USA Today recently wrote about how his own personal data loss as part of a larger column on passengers whose laptops were destroyed in the US Airways Flight 1549 emergency landing in the Hudson River. While Ed's data loss wasn't as dramatic of those onboard flight 1549, he luckily was using Carbonite and was easily able to restore his files. Carbonite's restore process is fast — even over a residential DSL, you can get 20-30GBs downloaded in less than a day. Because Ed was using Carbonite, his files were available right away. No waiting to have DVDs shipped in the mail or other similar kluges.

Has Carbonite saved your bacon, personally or professionally? Let me know your story via e-mail at David (dot) Friend (at) carbonite.com or in the comments.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I wanted to share some great press that Carbonite has gotten lately from the UK. First, Web User , a popular UK magazine, gave us the publication's top Gold Award and 5/5 stars. We beat out all the usual competitors for the Gold.

In addition to the Gold Award at Web User magazine, we also got kudos from The National Student Guide, Raising Kids, UK Family and Sixtyplusurfers. The staff at Sixtyplusurfers are big fans of Carbonite and have used the service themselves commenting: "I thoroughly advise everyone to use Carbonite. Both myself and Murray [publication editor] at Sixtyplusurfers subscribe to the service and would never be without it. Constantly saving all your work, data, pictures and all your important documents, the service is simple to use and unobtrusive."

We were also named by Tech Radar as one of the 15 best file synching apps on the planet at number seven.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

David Pogue recently posted an article regarding some online reviews from 2006 that were authored by but not attributed to Carbonite employees.

As we were just emerging as a company at that time, we did not have specific policies in place regarding employee engagement in reviews. In 2007, we put these policies into place to reflect our commitment to disclosure and transparency online. Since that time, I believe Carbonite employees have been scrupulous about following our policies. Carbonite employees are quite active on the blogs and know that they are to identify their Carbonite affiliation. We’re making sure that any old blog posts from 2006 are removed and apologize if anyone was misled by them.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Carbonite recently announced the completion of our Series C financing and a major deal with Lenovo. These two announcements generated some great press. But, there are two articles in particular that I wanted to share with you.

In an article that appeared in Mass High Tech, Christopher Calnan reported:

“

Online backup provider Carbonite Inc. recently closed its second bundling deal with a major personal computer manufacturer and followed that up last week by closing a Series C round of financing.

Boston-based Carbonite closed an agreement to provide free four-month online backup service subscriptions for the Ideapad line of desktop and laptop computers made by Hong Kong-based Lenovo Group Ltd., CEO David Friend said.

In June, Carbonite reached a similar agreement with Netherlands-based Packard Bell BV for the PC maker to bundle subscriptions for purchasers of Packard Bell desktop and notepad computers in Europe. Lenovo officials declined to confirm the deal with Carbonite.

Although Friend would not disclose the specifics of the Series C financing, he expects it to be enough to fuel Carbonite before it completes an initial public offering.

"That's the next step," Friend said. "The projections show that it will be the last cash we'll need. (Carbonite is) the type of company that should go public."

Shortly after, Xconomy reporter, Wade Roush published an article entitled "Carbonite Puts Its Online Backup Software on Lenovo Computers, Raises $20 Million" in which he notes:

“

Last Wednesday, the Mozy division of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced that its software will power an online backup service available to buyers of Thinkpad SL notebook computers, the newest line of business laptops from Lenovo. Not to be outdone, Boston-based Carbonite is expected to announce soon that it has formed an even broader partnership with the Chinese computer maker: All Lenovo IdeaPad and IdeaCentre computers—the company’s lines of home and home-office laptops and desktops, respectively—will now come with Carbonite's online backup software pre-installed.

At the same time, Carbonite is about to announce formally that it has closed a $20 million financing round, the third since the company's founding in 2005. (It raised $2.5 million in Series A funding in February, 2006, and completed a $15 million Series B round in May, 2007.)

Both of these articles attest to the fact that online backup is becoming mainstream. At some point in the future, we hope online backup is as common, and as top-of-mind, as anti-virus software is today.

— Alison

I just had to comment on a video that I saw on CNN.com (The transcript can be found on the Data Doctors website). The answer given by "the Data Doctor" is a little strange – the guy loves online backup but he doesn't like unlimited backup plans like Carbonite. He seems to think that they are hobbled in some way. This doesn't make an ounce of sense and it would have been good for the "doctors" to check their facts before making such pronouncements. The assertion that vendors with unlimited backup somehow throttle or limit backup speed or capacity in some way is just plain wrong. I know it's not the case with Carbonite, and I suspect that our competitors, like Mozy, similarly do not encumber their unlimited offers. It's amazing how these rumors and "common wisdoms" spread on the Internet and how infrequently experts actually bother to check the facts.

I love these guys for promoting online backup, but I wish they would have reported unlimited backup for the incredible deal that it actually is. I wish they would have said, "With disk storage costs dropping like a stone, vendors like Carbonite are able to offer truly unlimited capacity for a fixed price. Yeah, they probably lose money on a small percentage of their users, but by making it unlimited they keep the user from having to make a lot of compromises and choices."

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Although it didn't come as a surprise, the news about the SwapDrive acquisition has caused quite a stir in the industry.  Yesterday, we were in touch with eWeek and Backupreview.info, two sites that wanted to share Dave’s view on the acquisition.  eWeek published an article as well as a blog post that included much of what Dave posted on our blog yesterday. BackupReview.info also posted a Q & A to share Dave's thoughts with the online backup industry.

In addition, we issued the following press release:

June 11, 2008

Online Backup Continues to Emerge Mainstream as Old Industry Giant
Snaps up Another Established Backup Brand

BOSTON — (BUSINESS WIRE) — David Friend, CEO and co-founder of online data backup company Carbonite, says online backup is continuing to emerge mainstream, as illustrated by another old industry giant gobbling up an established online backup player.

Symantec acknowledged the truth of reports yesterday that it acquired SwapDrive and its companies, Backup.com and WhaleMail.com, leaving Carbonite as one of the last-standing large independent online backup services.

“Frankly, I was surprised that the price was so low, given how hot this market is,” Friend said. “However, that's the danger of being a white label provider to someone like Symantec. It's like the lawnmower company that sells 80 percent of its output to a major retailer. One day they come along and make you ‘an offer you can’t refuse,’ so to speak.”

In the past year, Mozy has been acquired by EMC and Arsenal Digital was acquired by IBM. In previous years Connected and LiveVault were acquired by Iron Mountain, and EVault was acquired by Seagate Technologies

“The online backup space is hot and everyone is suddenly interested in getting into the game,” Friend said. “Symantec realized you can protect your PC with antivirus, anti-spyware, and so forth, but the most important thing to protect is your data. Only online backup provides that protection. No anti-anything can keep your hard drive from crashing or keep a burglar from stealing your computer.”

Carbonite recently passed its 200 millionth file restored and has backed up more than three billion files for consumers and small businesses.

“One by one our competitors have been snapped up by big old companies and we are standing alone as the top independent backup provider,” Friend said. “We’re poised to become the trusted brand in online backup, much like Norton emerged for anti-virus. With a simple and trustworthy product, we are in a position to continue our rapid growth.”

About Carbonite

Carbonite launched its Online PCBackup™ service in May 2006. Carbonite’s industry-first offer of unlimited backup space for a flat low price revolutionized the market for consumer and small business backup services. So far the company has backed up more than 2.5 billion files, has restored more than 160 million lost files for its customers and has a large data center where capacity is measured in petabytes. There are Carbonite users in nearly 100 countries.

Founded in 2005, Carbonite believes that computer users should not have to think about backup. The company’s mission is to provide an affordable, reliable, secure and easy-to-use solution for the mainstream computer user. Carbonite is available to consumers and small business through numerous channels, including its corporate Web site, major US retailers and international distributors. For more information, please visit www.carbonite.com.

— Alison

Dave recently appeared on Fox Business News. In case you didn't have a chance to see it, you can stream it here on Fox Business News. Enjoy!

— Alison

Carbonite has received some excellent news coverage over the past week. I'm not going to post all the links, but there are two articles that I wanted to share with those of you who are interested.

First off, today, on the front page of the Business section of the Boston Globe, was an article about Online Backup. In the article, "Backups are a Breeze Online", Hiawatha Bray discusses the benefits of Carbonite and Mozy. More importantly, he sings the praises of Carbonite:

“

Given their nearly identical features, either Mozy or Carbonite will get the job done.

But Mozy is beset with a relatively geeky user interface and a tendency to throw up unexpected and confusing on-screen messages. Company officials admitted that they need to make their software more user-friendly. On that score, Carbonite is just about flawless. Just install it, launch it, and forget about it.

Earlier in the week (Monday, April 28th), Fort Myers News-Press tech columnist Al Winchell wrote about Carbonite, saying:

“

Carbonite not the least of which is I can personally attest to the fact that when I was ready to download my XP data from Carbonite to my new Vista hard drive, it performs flawlessly. I simply moved the Carbonite utility to my new Vista hard drive, selected the data I wanted to download (had I wanted to, I could have downloaded all 85 gigabytes of data) from Carbonite's Backup Drive presentation on my computer's list of drives, right-clicked on the data and selected 'Restore To.' That's all there was to it.

We are always happy to see the Carbonite message getting out there, because so few people realize that online backup is an easy and secure solution to preventing data loss. I'll be sure to keep you posted with more coverage.

Until then,

— Alison

Hi Everyone,

We're so excited that the Carbonite blog is up and running. There's been some great coverage on Carbonite recently and, for any of you that are interested, I thought I'd post the links here.

USA Today: Carbonite gets personal about backing up PC files

USA Today: Talking Tech Spotlight Video

Bootcamp Technology Show on Bloomberg Radio: Listen to an interview with David Friend

Spokesman Review: When hard drives fail: My experience shows you need to have a plan

I'll try to keep you posted as more coverage comes in.

Thanks!

— Alison