I found this very well-done explanation of Carbonite on YouTube. I don't know Cheryl Poirier, but she's very talented and fun to watch. Cheryl, if you're listening, send me an email! I'd love to thank you personally.

— 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

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

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

It looks like yet another "storage in the cloud" service is shuttering — Yahoo Briefcase will be closed down at the end of March, including their paid service, according to an email from Yahoo. This announcement follows close on the heels of AOL's shutdown of xDrive.

Other similar services, even some that have gotten great reviews, appear to be on life support. My take: there is no business model here. While these services are cool, few people find them compelling enough to pay for them. And the advertising thing hasn't worked either: there was some thought that they could scan your backed up files and try to figure out what advertising to target you with. Not a very attractive idea to most folks.

So why are hundreds of thousands of people willing to pay for Carbonite? Simple — we solve a real problem. The cost and pain of having your hard drive crash and losing all your financial records, business documents, wedding photos, and so forth, is so high that people will gladly shell out $50 a year to have the problem go away. Storage in the cloud, like Yahoo Briefcase, is not really a backup system. Yes, if you're willing to work at it, you can store files on Yahoo Briefcase. But they are not encrypted, updates are not automatic, it doesn't just work continuously in the background, there is limited capacity so you're always running out of space, there is no client software to check the integrity of the backup, no visual representation of what is backed up, no way to manage your bandwidth so that the backup doesn't drag your computer to its knees, there is no warning to tell you that your backup failed or is out of date, there is no way to easily restore all your files, no help with migrating from XP to Vista, and on and on. Storage in the cloud is, to some extent, a solution looking for a problem. Look for other similar services to pack it in over the next year.

— 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

External hard drives definitely have their place for doing backups. But most people don't realize that inexpensive consumer-grade hard drives fail just as frequently as the hard drives built into their computers. And, if they are right next to your computer, they will typically share its fate in the event of theft, fire, power surges, etc. Now here's another thing to worry about: firmware bugs.

IDG news service reported last month that several models of Seagate's popular Barracuda and DiamondMax external hard drives have faulty firmware that is causing the hard drives to "freeze" under certain conditions. The article that I read refers to this condition as "bricked," a term I hadn't run across before but which is amusingly descriptive of what you can do with a frozen hard drive. Seagate is a great company, so I'm sure they'll fix this problem, but there's only so much you can do when there is a single point of failure.

As I've said in the past, any single hard drive is going to be much more vulnerable to data loss than the RAID arrays that Carbonite uses (which are 36,000,000 times more reliable than a single hard drive because of redundancy). So while external drives are a good and inexpensive way to store big files such as ripped movies or TV shows, I wouldn't consider them safe enough to store my irreplaceable photos or financial records.

— 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

The Sunday New York Times had this little story regarding one of the passengers on the US Air flight that crashed into the Hudson River:

“

When US Airways Flight 1549 went into the Hudson River last month, it gave William Wiley, an engineer at Software Associates, a new meaning for the term "computer crash."

Mr. Wiley was on his way home to Johnson, Tenn., from the company's headquarters on Long Island. He had years of work on his laptop, carefully backed up on another laptop — but both were on the plane with him.

Now the two laptops are among approximately 50,000 passenger items that a mortuary company has frozen, in refrigerated trucks, to preserve them until they can be dried, cleaned and returned to their owners."

Good luck getting the data back from a wet and frozen hard drive.

This particular situation is not likely to happen to anyone, but you can imagine innumerable similar circumstances. The more frequent event is that someone breaks into your house or car and steals your computer and the external backup drive sitting next to it. We hear stories like that all the time.

In any event, the US Air story, like the California wildfire stories last Fall, all mount up to a compelling reason to backup online where the data is safe from all these hazards.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite