I thought I would share a nice letter that one of Kim Komando's listeners sent to her and that she forwarded:

“

Dear Kim,

THANK YOU for repeatedly mentioning Carbonite.com! Our computer crashed two weeks ago and we had to replace it. We were able to recover 99 gigs of data that would have been lost if I hadn't heard your ad and nagged my husband until he started the back up process with Carbonite about 9 months ago.

- Cindi Johnston

Thank you, Cindi, for the kind words. I've gotten to know Kim over the last year and she's been a great spokesperson for Carbonite. I enjoy all our other spokespersons, but how often do you run across a smart, beautiful, blonde, self-professed geek with 4 million listeners? If you aren't already a listener, she does a great show. Check her web site, www.Komando.com, for a station in your area. And in her Small Business Center , you'll find a podcast we recorded last time I was out visiting her.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Over the weekend we launched Remote Access — an application that lets you access and download your backed up files from any computer with a web browser. This is an application that I have wanted personally for a long time. Last year I was on a business trip to Hong Kong and discovered that a Powerpoint presentation I had put together for one of my meetings had not gotten transferred to my laptop. Luckily, I was able to use the alpha version of Remote Access to download the presentation from the backup of my office desktop computer. What a life-saver!

The new feature is accessible to all Carbonite users from our home page. Just click the new "Remote Access" tab in the upper right corner of the screen. Once you enter your email address and password, you can navigate through your backed up files and instantly download any of them.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I found this question on Twitter. Short answer: Carbonite checks this in the background using something called a checksum. As amazing as it sounds, about every 90 days Carbonite goes through every one of the roughly 25 billion files we have backed up and checks to make sure that the file in our backup still matches what's on your PC bit for bit.

If you are still feeling nervous, try this: Pick any backed up file on your PC (it will have a green dot on it if it's backed up with Carbonite). Delete it. Now open the Carbonite Backup Drive from the icon on your desktop. Find the file you just deleted – the status column will say "Right-click to restore latest backup copy (Original file deleted)." Right-click on the file, and select "Restore." In a few seconds, you'll see a Carbonite pop-up saying that the file has been restored. Go back to your C: drive and open the restored file. You'll see that it's perfect. I'm sure this is true of every file on you've backed up with Carbonite.

— 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

Carbonite has received some excellent news coverage over the past week. I'm not going to post all the links, but there are two articles that I wanted to share with those of you who are interested.

First off, today, on the front page of the Business section of the Boston Globe, was an article about Online Backup. In the article, "Backups are a Breeze Online", Hiawatha Bray discusses the benefits of Carbonite and Mozy. More importantly, he sings the praises of Carbonite:

“

Given their nearly identical features, either Mozy or Carbonite will get the job done.

But Mozy is beset with a relatively geeky user interface and a tendency to throw up unexpected and confusing on-screen messages. Company officials admitted that they need to make their software more user-friendly. On that score, Carbonite is just about flawless. Just install it, launch it, and forget about it.

Earlier in the week (Monday, April 28th), Fort Myers News-Press tech columnist Al Winchell wrote about Carbonite, saying:

“

Carbonite not the least of which is I can personally attest to the fact that when I was ready to download my XP data from Carbonite to my new Vista hard drive, it performs flawlessly. I simply moved the Carbonite utility to my new Vista hard drive, selected the data I wanted to download (had I wanted to, I could have downloaded all 85 gigabytes of data) from Carbonite's Backup Drive presentation on my computer's list of drives, right-clicked on the data and selected 'Restore To.' That's all there was to it.

We are always happy to see the Carbonite message getting out there, because so few people realize that online backup is an easy and secure solution to preventing data loss. I'll be sure to keep you posted with more coverage.

Until then,

— Alison