I’m David Friend, Carbonite’s co-founder and CEO. I’ve been asked to launch our new blog with a few words about the company, how we got started and what we are trying to achieve. I’m looking forward to being an active participant on this blog and hope you will take the time to do the same.

Jeff Flowers and I founded Carbonite in 2005. We got the idea because Jeff’s wife had her laptop stolen (it wasn’t backed up) and my daughter had a hard drive crash (she lost half a semester’s work). We couldn’t find a good solution for them, so we decided to build one ourselves.

In general, our design philosophy is “simple is better.” We prefer products like the iPod over things with tons of features but are hard to use. The problem we’re trying to solve with Carbonite is a simple one: any day we could lose everything on our computers. And we think this problem demands a simple solution. That’s why we created the first unlimited pricing plan in the backup industry – you don’t have to make any choices, and you never outgrow it. That’s why we made our backup continuous – most people want to backup as they go and not have to worry about leaving their computer on all night for some old-fashioned batch job to run. And most people want to know that their data is really safe, so we use the strongest commercial encryption available and we store our customers’ data on redundant disk arrays that are 36 million times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. Our idea of a great product advance is figuring out how to eliminate an unnecessary feature (which adds needless complexity) by making it automatic so you don’t have to think about it.

Are we perfect? No. We have a long list of great ideas for ways to improve the service and we’re implementing them with each new release. Most of these ideas we get from our users (even more of an incentive for you to leave comments). Mostly we want things to be simpler, cleaner, more self-explanatory. Nobody we know really wants to “use” a backup system – they just want their data to be completely safe. So the easier the better.

In future blog posts, I’ll tell you about some of our challenges. Meanwhile, I’d like to hear from you: do you have thoughts or questions about the product, our service (I know, sometimes you have to wait to talk to a customer support rep – we’re working on it), or the people who make up our company?

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite