Microsoft announced yesterday that they were "throwing in the towel" on their Live OneCare service which included a backup service. According to the web site, "data are continuously protected—automatically backed up on-schedule to a single location I specify."

This announcement comes on the heels of AOL shuttering its xDrive backup service and several smaller competitors biting the dust. Meanwhile Carbonite continues to grow at double-digit month-over-month rates. And we think at least one of our "pure play" competitors is also enjoying substantial growth. So what's going on here?

I think it's a matter of focus. Some vendors seem to think that backing up your PC isn't enough. You ought to throw in anti-virus, firewall, syncing PCs and mobile devices, sharing photos with friends and family, and many other "features." Most of these products seem to be dead or on life support.

Everyone knows they should be backing up their PCs. It's a big and immediate problem. Most of these other features are things that the user already has or are simply a "nice to have" for some subset of users (often younger users who tend to not want to pay for such things). When you have all these other features to sell, it dilutes the important message that you need to be backing up your computer. And because most of them have so many features to support, they don't do a particularly good job at any of them. We're content just to do a spectacularly good job at backup (if I do say so myself). In five years, I believe half the world's PCs will be backing up online. If we want to continue to be number one in this market, we really have to focus and do a better job than anyone else.

I think Microsoft has found that their expertise at writing software does not automatically translate into an ability to run a rock-solid backup service. When we were out raising our first rounds of venture capital a couple of years ago, I was told repeatedly by investors that Microsoft was going to enter this market and crush us. What has been demonstrated time and again is that if you focus on doing one job exceptionally well and if you're motivated to the point where you’re life depends on it, no big corporation can keep you down.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

According to a recently released survey by Compuware, most data loss is attributable to either user negligence or malice. Only 1% of data loss is due to hackers. I loved the headline on this story: "3/4 idiots, 1/4 bitterness."

I have to confess to being part of the "idiot" crowd. Three weeks ago I left my laptop sitting on my seat when I got off the train in New York. I remembered it just in time to see my train, with laptop still aboard, disappearing down the track. Except for occasionally recovering individual files that I accidentally delete or overwrite, I haven't actually had a PC disaster since starting Carbonite 3 years ago. So, aside from the pain of having to buy a new laptop, it was fun to use my own product to get everything back. I was really proud of how well it worked.

What I don't see in the Compuware survey is data lost to hard drive failure. For some reason this doesn't show up in the survey, even though I will bet you that it tops all the other categories. We use a LOT of hard drives in our data center, and our statistics show that roughly 3% of all hard drives will fail each year. That's why we use RAID arrays which are 36 million times more reliable than a single drive. Google also publishes their disk failure rate, and it's roughly the same as ours. Hard drives are a data disaster waiting to happen, in our experience. That's why you need a LOT of redundancy in your data storage architecture, as we do. We store our customers' encrypted data on 16 drive arrays. We would have to lose 3 of the 16 drives simultaneously AND your PC would have to crash all at the same time before any data is lost. When you figure the odds of this happening, it's very very close to zero.

I hope you never leave your laptop on Amtrak, but if you do, you'll be glad you've got Carbonite.

— 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 thought you all might be interested to see where all your files live when you back up with Carbonite. This is one aisle of disk drives from our Boston data center. What you're looking at are arrays of 16 1TB data-center grade drives in a RAID-6 array. 3 of the 16 drives would have to fail simultaneously before we would lose any data. This RAID configuration is 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive. Generally we don't even wait for a drive to fail — we have software that can tell when a drive is starting to get flakey and an alarm goes off on our operations console. A technician pulls the disk and puts in a new one. Within an hour, the new disk is automatically rebuilt and the full redundancy is restored. Every day we back up almost 60 million new files. We have backed up over 11 billion files since we turned our data center on in May 2006. The data center has over 9 petabytes of storage (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). All of this data flows in and out of our data center on two little fiber optic cables the size of a lamp cord. Truly amazing.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

As reported by By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post Staff Writer, on Friday, August 1, 2008, Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. An increasing number of international travelers have reported that their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices had been taken -- for months, in at least one case -- and their contents examined.

Personally, I'd be pretty bent out of shape if Homeland Security took my laptop the next time I came through customs. But apparently this is happening with increasing frequency and with no explanation and no requirement that it be returned in any reasonable period of time. Putting civil liberties and privacy issues aside, I've got a lot of valuable stuff on my laptop that I need for my business, not to mention family pictures and all the music I love to listen to while traveling. Plus, I'd have to go out and get a new laptop because I couldn't be sure when I'd be getting the other one back – that would set me back $1500, not including the software that I've purchased.

So a word of caution for anyone traveling outside the US – back up your PC online. If you have Carbonite and you open your laptop in the Hong Kong airport, Carbonite will automatically back up the work you've been doing while you're on the road. At least then you can be back in business quickly if your computer gets taken by our government on your return.

And if you're really worried about the privacy of your files, encrypt them on your laptop (I wonder if they can force you to give them the key?) and when signing up for Carbonite, choose to keep your own encryption key. That way, if they come to us with a court order, all we'll be able to turn over are your encrypted files. With the kind of encryption we use, these would be pretty useless without a huge effort. (But, if you choose to manage your own key, don't lose it, because there's no way to get your files back without it.)

Me personally, I'm going to write to my representatives. I don't like the idea that the government can go on a fishing expedition on a US citizen without probable cause. It's chilling!

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

A friend of mine sent me this picture. If only she had had Carbonite!

— 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

I wanted to bring to your attention another very nice review of Carbonite. This one, by Mike, at Simply Offsite is thoughtful and balanced, IMHO. In the comments on his blog, I did try to explain why it's very hard for Carbonite to have an "estimated time to completion" indication for the initial backup like some other backup services do. The reason, in short, is that Carbonite allocates bandwidth dynamically so that it never interferes with your browsing. If you're using the Internet for other things, Carbonite will automatically slow down to get out of the way. So we can't tell you how long your backup is going to take because it depends on whether you'll be using your computer in the meantime. Other backup services transfer data at a steady pace. So while that makes the backup time predictable, it also means that your computer is going to feel really sluggish while the backup is going on – not a good thing.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I just had to comment on a video that I saw on CNN.com (The transcript can be found on the Data Doctors website). The answer given by "the Data Doctor" is a little strange – the guy loves online backup but he doesn't like unlimited backup plans like Carbonite. He seems to think that they are hobbled in some way. This doesn't make an ounce of sense and it would have been good for the "doctors" to check their facts before making such pronouncements. The assertion that vendors with unlimited backup somehow throttle or limit backup speed or capacity in some way is just plain wrong. I know it's not the case with Carbonite, and I suspect that our competitors, like Mozy, similarly do not encumber their unlimited offers. It's amazing how these rumors and "common wisdoms" spread on the Internet and how infrequently experts actually bother to check the facts.

I love these guys for promoting online backup, but I wish they would have reported unlimited backup for the incredible deal that it actually is. I wish they would have said, "With disk storage costs dropping like a stone, vendors like Carbonite are able to offer truly unlimited capacity for a fixed price. Yeah, they probably lose money on a small percentage of their users, but by making it unlimited they keep the user from having to make a lot of compromises and choices."

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite