Our Mac product, which launched earlier this year, continues to receive a good reception from the media.

We've recently had reviews published with MacFormat and MacWorld magazines.

Christopher Phin from MacFormat awarded Carbonite 4/5 stars and appreciated our efforts to design a Mac version of the product:

“

Unlike many companies that have developed a PC application and then gone on to make a Mac version, the developers genuinely seem to have 'got' the Mac."

MacWorld magazine also awarded Carbonite 4/5 stars. Karl Hodge noted how the low cost is small price to pay for piece of mind.

“

The client is highly configurable and can be set to run when it's convenient. Costing around £3 a month to run, it's a low price for a little peace of mind."

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Wow, they just keep coming. Another 5-star review for Carbonite's Mac version, this time from MacUser Magazine: "Verdict: This good value online storage solution is so easy-to-use you'll have no excuse not to back up your files."

Check out the whole review here

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Another nice recognition of Carbonite comes from the UK magazine Which? — similar to Consumer Reports in the US. They gave us their Best Buy rating, and that's apparently not easy to obtain. What they said is,

“

This accolade is far from easy to obtain. In fact, Best Buys are only awarded to those products that have performed to the highest standards in Which?'s rigorous testing and analysis, and cannot be requested or bought. This coveted award can be seen in the national advertising campaigns of popular brands including Miele, Panasonic and Procter & Gamble."

“

Our magazines do not carry advertising, we do not accept sponsorship of any kind and — just as a consumer would — we buy all of the thousands of products we test each year. It is for these reasons that consumers can truly trust the unbiased information we provide."

  I was unaware of this magazine, but my friends in Europe say they swear by it. Thank you, Which?.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

As I've mentioned in past posts, one of the metrics I track every week at Carbonite is how satisfied our customers are with our customer support. Those of you who have interacted with our customer support team know that each interaction is followed by a short survey — that's how I get the data. Over the last 9 months we have made great strides and our "satisfied/very satisfied" numbers are now well above industry averages and still rising.

These improvements, along with the rock solid performance of our data centers, have lead to Carbonite being listed in the PC Pro Reliability and Service Award in the software category. The awards are judged via an open survey that asks PC users to express their views on hardware and software purchased over the last year. Those who are nominated are encouraged to promote voting with their customers in order to help the judges gain as much feedback as possible.

The PC Pro nomination comes on the heels of winning a Webware 100 award where we were voted up by thousands of readers.

If you'd like to participate, please click here to visit the survey. You can just click Next 4 times to get to the software page. Once you've voted and expressed other relevant feedback, you can either identify yourself or just skip to the end of the survey.

Thanks, we appreciate your support and recognition.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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

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

Carbonite is suing a vendor over some equipment that we bought back in 2006 and 2007 (see posts below). From a news standpoint, we thought that this was an inconsequential story about a minor trade dispute. Wrong. It has turned into a PR fiasco for Carbonite, and highlights the danger of Internet "news" where every writer is just copying what he or she has read elsewhere and NOBODY is doing what a real reporter does: check the primary sources.

Hundreds of blogs sensationalized our lawsuit by implying that 7500 Carbonite customers had lost data (the real number was 54) and that it is a current ongoing problem (it was over a year ago and we no longer buy servers from Promise).

Throughout all of this, NOT ONE person bothered to pick up the phone and call me to get the facts. Few if any read what was actually in the lawsuit. The story simply passed from one blogger to another, getting juicier along the way.

Newspapers have been folding up around the country. If all we're left with are Internet bloggers who get their material by reading what others have already said, who is actually going to do the investigative reporting? Who is going to call the parties involved and ask, "Is this true what I've read on the Internet?" Where are the newsroom editors who will redline a reporter's story, asking "What is your source?" While I don't believe there was any malice regarding Carbonite, what's to stop someone from starting a malicious rumor that spreads like wildfire?

My email address is right on our web site. It wouldn't have been hard to call or write asking for comment and a copy of the actual lawsuit. News on the Internet is free, but it's pretty clear that you get what you pay for.

I would like to commend one tech writer who had the good manners to post an apology on my blog.

“

I received an email from Dave Friend today regarding a post on my technical blog (http://techtips.timlaytonllc.com). I had written a brief article about the loss of data for 7,500 carbonite.com customers. I first learned of the data loss via my Twitter feed (twitter.com/timlaytonsr) and then I performed a google search confirming the story. All of the various stories basically read the same so I felt comfortable publishing my article based on the vast number of what I believed to be reliable sources that I found via the web.

After reading Dave's email in detail we exchanged several conversations back and forth. I quickly realized that I had not gotten the full story via the many sources that I used to research my article. 

I have lived long enough to realize that there are usually two sides to every pancake. It is very unfortunate when hard-working reliable organizations like Carbonite experience negative and damaging press when all of the facts were clearly not reported by the masses.

I am writing today to offer my humble apology to Dave Friend and the Carbonite team. I learned a valuable lesson today — so thank you...

Regards,
Tim Layton

Thank you Tim.

— 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

I got an email this morning from a long-time user complaining about our recent price increase: "It's great that you've released Remote Access, but why does that justify a price increase?" As you may know, we recently increased our yearly subscription fee by $5, to $54.95. The simple fact is that the size of our average user's backup is growing by about 3% per month. That's 36% more data every year, and consequently we have to buy 36% more disk space and pay for 36% more bandwidth. Luckily the price of disk storage is also coming down, so we can keep our price increase to just 10% after 3 years. There's a new generation of less expensive 2TB drives coming out later this year that should allow us to hold this price for quite a long time — certainly several years. Meanwhile, we're still 10% less expensive on an annual basis than the companies that are hawking $4.95/mo ($59.40/yr).

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite