I read an interesting article on Yahoo news this morning: 1 in 3 laptops die in the first three years.

The survey, conducted by SquareTrade, a warranty company, highlighted the following statistics: Looking at the first 3 years of ownership, 31% of laptop owners reported a failure to SquareTrade. Two-thirds of this failure (20.4%) came from hardware malfunctions, and one-third (10.6%) was reported as accidental damage. The complete report is available here: http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf

These findings correlate quite well with the actual behavior of our users: approximately 11% of our users have to do a full restore of their data each year. Over three years, that's almost exactly the same 33% number. Another interesting statistic from our own user base is that almost half of all users do a partial restore each year — mostly to recover accidentally deleted or overwritten files.

I'll bet that if you asked the average computer user what the likelihood is of their computer data getting destroyed, they would guess a much lower number. Having a 1 in 3 chance that you are going to lose everything on your PC only highlights why online backup is so important.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I am very pleased to announce that my long-time business partner and Carbonite CTO has won the coveted "CTO of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. The award was given at a big dinner at the Boston Marriott last week, and we're very proud of Jeff. He joins a group of technology leaders from the Northeast that includes many of the pioneers of today's IT industry. Having worked with Jeff for more than 25 years through 4 other startups, it is impossible for me to contemplate starting a company without him. He's that rare combination of technical guru, sensible business head, and mentor for the technical team. Congratulations Jeff!

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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

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

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

Think backing up to DVDs is a good idea? Not in the opinion of David Pogue, the technology columnist for the New York Times. I hadn't thought about this, but holy smokes! Here's an excerpt from his Dec. 10th post:

“

Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I've got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn't big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.) Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD's were unreadable. They're less than four years old! … I know, of course, that home-burned DVD's, which rely on organic dye that deteriorates with time, are nowhere near as long-lived as commercially pressed discs. But man. Four years? Scared the bejeezus out of me. I've been told by experts that the gold DVD blanks can indeed last 100 years. Guess I'll be trying that next!

So even if you can find the DVDs (would surely be a problem in my messy office) and they don't get scratched or destroyed, they may just be completely unreadable. Another reason to back up online.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite