I read a blog post from Australia today hinting that Google may be getting into the backup business. Actually, what this article says is, "Online backup services allow people to use the internet like a hard drive." Those are their words, not ours. Carbonite thinks backup is a lot more than just disk space in the cloud.

Think about the problem you’re trying to solve: Tomorrow you might wake up and find out that your hard drive has crashed and everything on your PC is gone. Or maybe you’re like me and you leave your laptop in a taxi in NY and watch in frustration as it disappears around the corner forever. Or maybe you’ve been working on that big presentation for the last week and at the last minute you do something dumb and erase it.

There have been rumours about Google and Microsoft getting into the backup business for more than a year. Microsoft finally unveiled their entry called Windows Live SkyDrive. Google’s rumoured "G-drive" has yet to appear, but we’re guessing it will be similar to Sky Drive – less about automated backup and more about collaboration, file sharing, and storing a limited number of active documents in the cloud. It will not be free. Like SkyDrive, you’ll get a certain amount of space for free, and you’ll have to pay for more. Compared with Carbonite, it will be expensive for most users. It will not encrypt your data because encrypting make sharing applications nearly impossible. And it won’t automatically back up everything on your PC as we do. You’ll have to make a lot of choices and think about it each time.

Our idea of backup is that it should be like buying car insurance – once you purchase it, you put it in the drawer until disaster strikes. The less intrusive it is, the better. The one feature of SkyDrive that I like is the ability to access a backed up file remotely in an emergency. I was recently on a business trip and forgot to bring a file that I had on my home computer. It would have been nice to get it from my home computer’s Carbonite backup. We’ve figured out a way to do this that preserves the encryption and security of Carbonite’s backup, and I am hoping we can get this feature into a release later this year.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite