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

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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