Kim Komando sent me this letter that she got from one of her listeners:

“

Dear Kim:

Not really a question...What was I (NOT)thinking????? My husband and I were in Hawaii on business when we heard there was a wildfire in Santa Barbara — near our neighborhood. While trying to keep the panic down, talking with the house sitter who was caring for our two dogs and cat...I suddenly realized — OUR COMPUTERS!!! I had the laptop, but all the real stuff was on my external drive. That little black box..sitting on my desk in a house that could burn down. Our house sitter had already evacuated and wouldn't be able to get back in — perhaps our niece's husband could make his way to and in the house to retrieve the box? He did get it but I couldn't help but think of the ramifications had he not been successful.

The bottom line — I not only GOT how valuable Carbonite was — but I also GOT how stupid of me to be sitting at the airport trying to get back home and have to worry about losing all our data. It's day three and my Carbonite is still backing up. Kim — many thanks for recommending it and oh yes — we still have our house (and Carbonite).

- Maria

By chance, one of Carbonite's investors, Floyd Bradley, lives in the same neighborhood and sent me this picture from his back yard. Better believe he has Carbonite on ALL his computers!

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

We recently got an angry email from one of our customers who demanded that we stop advertising on a particular radio program because she did not like the views expressed by the host.

Before we started advertising on radio, I thought about this issue long and hard. I have pretty strong political views myself and I don't agree with some of what I hear on the radio. But nobody is being forced to listen. So I have concluded that I should do what I can as a private individual to support the causes I believe in. But I should not burden my company, my employees, and my investors, with the yoke of my own political positions. In the end, we at Carbonite have an important mission — building the world's greatest backup service. And it's not really for us to parse radicals from reactionaries, believers from atheists, blacks from whites, or arrogant from humble. Once you start going down that path, you might as well shutter your business and retire.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I thought I would share a nice letter that one of Kim Komando's listeners sent to her and that she forwarded:

“

Dear Kim,

THANK YOU for repeatedly mentioning Carbonite.com! Our computer crashed two weeks ago and we had to replace it. We were able to recover 99 gigs of data that would have been lost if I hadn't heard your ad and nagged my husband until he started the back up process with Carbonite about 9 months ago.

- Cindi Johnston

Thank you, Cindi, for the kind words. I've gotten to know Kim over the last year and she's been a great spokesperson for Carbonite. I enjoy all our other spokespersons, but how often do you run across a smart, beautiful, blonde, self-professed geek with 4 million listeners? If you aren't already a listener, she does a great show. Check her web site, www.Komando.com, for a station in your area. And in her Small Business Center , you'll find a podcast we recorded last time I was out visiting her.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

A few months ago Carbonite introduced a new capability in customer support called "GoToAssist" and I wanted to say a few words about it.

Carbonite has three ways for you to get support: free email, free live chat, and Premium phone support, which costs $19.95 per year. Over the past three months, we have been carefully monitoring all three to determine which solves our customers' problems the fastest. The winner, surprisingly, is not phone, but Live Chat. In many cases, what really makes the difference is our GoToAssist capability. This feature lets our customer support reps actually look at your computer screen remotely, diagnose your problem and fix it. You don't have to sit there on the phone while the rep asks you to describe what you're seeing, and then tells you what buttons to push. He just does it himself.

We've been training all our people to use this capability, and we're now pretty much up to speed. Our objective is to keep wait times under 2 minutes, though it does vary at different times of the day. We're graduating a new class of support reps in May, so times should get even faster. I hope that by this Fall customer support answer times will be almost instantaneous. We've been spending a lot of money on systems that keep all our reps busy either answering emails, chats, or the phone.

Below is a letter that we got from one of our customers concerning her satisfaction with a GoToAssist session. This is the kind of outcome we strive for at all times.

“

Dear Mr. Robison,

I wanted to express my appreciation for Ulysses and his assistance with an ongoing problem in restoring Carbonite to our computer. After emails with clear instructions and then finally using the Citrix GoToAssist program, he was finally able to restore the program. It took him about 30 minutes in order to figure out the source of the problem, and then he remedied the problem.

Thank you for able assistants, and in particular for Ulysses.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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

As most of you already know, Carbonite does a lot of radio advertising. The theory behind our advertising is simple: we know from our surveys that about 98% of our users say that they would "recommend Carbonite to friends and family," so people love the product. It's just a matter of getting people to try it. But most people have never heard of Carbonite. So the challenge for us as a business has been to let people know what we do, and to hear it from someone they trust. Talk shows work well because listeners tend to trust the host — if they didn't they probably wouldn't be listeners. Some ads work better than others, but one thing that always seems to work is when real Carbonite users write in and tell their own personal stories of how Carbonite helped them out.

The attached clip from one of Rush Limbaugh's listeners does a really great job of explaining the value proposition of online backup. Whether the host is Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, or Jimmy Kimmel, the stories of real users are the best endorsements that a company could get — more powerful than us saying it, or even the host.

Rush reads letter from listener.mp3 (1.87 mb)

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I got a nice letter from a user who was saved by Carbonite. For those of you who are running your own business, I'd recommend taking a look at her blog: http://www.ecommercediva.com. I was impressed with all the good advice. Here's her letter:

“

As a full-time "multipreneur" with several businesses — most of them virtual — my livelihood is in my computer. Over the years I've had a number of computer meltdowns where my data was lost. I'm a busy woman, never seemed to have the time or discipline to manually backup my data as often as I should have. I learned the hard way several years ago when my computer's hard drive literally melted and I lost almost all of my files and contacts. I vowed "never again!" My data is too important to gamble with.

Desperate for a solution that wouldn't fall victim to my busy schedule or my memory, I turned to Carbonite in January 2007. It was affordable and painless. Set up was so easy a monkey could do it! I just set it and forget it, and it automatically backs up all my important files and program settings, and even my music downloads. In May this year, I had another computer meltdown, and everything on my hard drive got wiped out. This time I was prepared — I simply retreived my data from Carbonite and I was back up and running pretty soon afterwards. What a relief.

Regards,

Jamila

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite