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

Over the weekend we launched Remote Access — an application that lets you access and download your backed up files from any computer with a web browser. This is an application that I have wanted personally for a long time. Last year I was on a business trip to Hong Kong and discovered that a Powerpoint presentation I had put together for one of my meetings had not gotten transferred to my laptop. Luckily, I was able to use the alpha version of Remote Access to download the presentation from the backup of my office desktop computer. What a life-saver!

The new feature is accessible to all Carbonite users from our home page. Just click the new "Remote Access" tab in the upper right corner of the screen. Once you enter your email address and password, you can navigate through your backed up files and instantly download any of them.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

After a really long series of betas, Carbonite for Mac is finally launched and off to a strong start. I have to confess that this product has been a lot longer in coming than I had ever expected. We actually had a working version over a year ago, but when we put it out to the Mac community the feedback was that it had too much of the look and feel of a Windows product. So we decided to assemble a new development team composed only of Mac fanatics and they completely redesigned the interface. We put the resulting new version into beta again about 4 months ago, and this time the reaction from the Mac community has been great. "Simple and intuitive, just like the Mac," one beta user wrote to me. "I like the set-and-forget aspect of Carbonite. I'm am so tired of messing around with Time Machine, and it's half the price," said another.

The release of Carbonite for Mac completes a long cycle for me. Back in 2005, one of the events that got Jeff and me to start Carbonite was my daughter's hard drive crashing. As a Mac user, she's been waiting a long time. I've been a Windows guy for years, but I now have both a Mac and Windows machine on my desk and I can understand why my kids have migrated to the Mac – it's a great machine.

— 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

Every so often I get a briefing from our operations staff on data center statistics. Last week, I learned one number that startled even me: as of Jan 20th, we had restored over 2 billion files for our customers. I assume that most of these files would have been lost if they had not had Carbonite. Also, Carbonite's restore process has been extremely reliable. You'd think with that many files being restored that there would be some that are lost or corrupt. While these kinds of problems occurred once in a while when we were young, it doesn't seem to happen anymore. The RAID disk arrays that we use to store your data are 36 million times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. That's one reason that online backup is far more reliable than a cheap external hard drive.

But this reliability has not completely eliminated restore issues. Even though the Carbonite service works flawlessly, data restores are still an issue with Customer Support. There are basically three problems: First, some programs, notably Outlook and Quicken, don't automatically find the restored files. So it's not uncommon for us to get calls complaining that they did a restore and they didn't get their Outlook file back. It is in fact there on your computer, but you have to go into Outlook to connect to it.

The second problem is that Carbonite defaults to backing up your Documents and Settings folder, and all subfolders. If you stick files somewhere else, such as in your Programs folder, they won't get backed up unless you tell Carbonite to do so. This is true of any backup you do, whether online or using an external hard drive or flash drive. If you don't back up the file in the first place, you won't be able to restore it when your computer dies. That's why we put the little green dots on folders and files – it makes it easy to see what is backed up and what is not.

The third problem relates to restoring files that were backed up from an XP computer onto a new Vista computer. Vista and XP don't have the same folders. We came up with a very nice "wizard" that helps you decide how you want to migrate your old XP folders to your new Vista machine. If you have to do this kind of restore, use the wizard! Some people just ignore it and then their folders are all over the place and they can't find them. BTW, Carbonite is still the only backup service that has addressed this problem.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Our friend Leo Laporte finally got me going on Twitter (dfriend). We've had a company Twitter account (carbonitebackup) for a while. I can tell that I'm never going to be able to keep up with this – way too much information. But reading through recent posts is very informative, and you're welcome to follow me if you want occasional updates.

— 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

Several people have asked me to post a description of our infrastructure. As I mentioned in my previous post about HP’s infrastructure difficulties, "HP Upline and the challenge of large scale backup," keeping billions of files safe is no small task.

The first thing you should know about our architecture is that we never handle unencrypted data. Carbonite encrypts all files before they leave your PC. We use 448-bit Blowfish encryption. I’ve been told that Blowfish has never been cracked. It is the strongest commercial encryption on the market.

Carbonite employs the most sophisticated firewalls and intrusion detection systems available. We pay a professional hacker firm to attack the data center constantly, looking for security holes. I think our defenses are as good as most banks. Heise Security recently wrote about how they hacked into many of our competitors’ backup systems but were unable to hack into Carbonite Their so-called “Man-In-The-Middle” test attack is something we designed against from the beginning. Frankly, I was amazed that most of the other vendors were so easily hacked by these guys and backed up files either compromised or deleted.

At our secure data center, your data is stored on arrays of 1-terabyte enterprise-grade drives. Carbonite uses RAID-6 redundant arrays which spread copies of the data across multiple hard drives. Each array has 16 drives. Three of the 16 would have to fail simultaneously and the user’s PC would have to crash at the same time before any data would be lost. These RAID-6 arrays are 36,000,000 times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. We have redundant power, redundant Internet connections, redundant Web servers and so forth. The data center is guarded 24 hours a day, seven days a week; and admission is controlled by fingerprint ID locks.

As you can imagine, we use a lot of bandwidth. We currently back up over 40 million new files every day and we have over 7 billion already backed up. Given the amount of bandwidth we use, it’s best to be located in a major telecoms center where multiple carriers converge. Therefore, we chose to build our data center in one of those so-called “bomb-proof” buildings with all the major Boston financial institutions and telcos.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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

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