Last week, a user posted on her blog: Are there any real advantages to a Windows Home Server other than remote access and backing up multimedia?

One respondent said it was just a "NAS with a fancy menu." Even though the blogger already has Carbonite, a NAS or some kind of local or network backup can make some sense. I don’t see Home Server as competition. I see it as complimentary.

I was recently talking to one of our users who was concerned that his initial backup was taking too long. Turns out he had over 200GBs of TV shows that he'd recorded and he was backing them up on Carbonite. Using his DSL connection, it's probably going to take him several months to back up all that stuff and meanwhile his business documents (Word and Excel primarily) are waiting in the queue and could be lost if his computer crashed in the meantime. When I asked him how important the TV shows were, his answer was "I really don't care about the TV shows. If I lost them, it wouldn't be the end of the world."

My suggestion: If there are REALLY BIG files that have relatively low value, back them up locally. If you have small files that are high value, back them up on Carbonite. When the important files are safe and sound, then you can back up the other stuff. Most people never bother to learn how to select what they do and don't want to back up with Carbonite. It's pretty simple (just right click on the folder with the TV shows and select Carbonite – don't back this up). Local backup, of course, is a lot faster than backing up over the Internet. But, as you can see from the post about my son's fire, local backup does have certain limitations.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Think backing up to DVDs is a good idea? Not in the opinion of David Pogue, the technology columnist for the New York Times. I hadn't thought about this, but holy smokes! Here's an excerpt from his Dec. 10th post:

“

Jeez Louise. A conference organizer asked if I could put together a DVD loop of my funniest Web videos, to play in the registration area while attendees stand in line. No problem, I thought: I've got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn't big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.) Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD's were unreadable. They're less than four years old! … I know, of course, that home-burned DVD's, which rely on organic dye that deteriorates with time, are nowhere near as long-lived as commercially pressed discs. But man. Four years? Scared the bejeezus out of me. I've been told by experts that the gold DVD blanks can indeed last 100 years. Guess I'll be trying that next!

So even if you can find the DVDs (would surely be a problem in my messy office) and they don't get scratched or destroyed, they may just be completely unreadable. Another reason to back up online.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Earlier this week I had gotten a note from one of our employees about the recent fires in Santa Barbara, CA. 230 houses burned down. All the people who thought they had their data backed up on CDs, DVDs, and external hard drives lost everything.

Then it happened in my own family. My son's house in Cambridge, MA was completely gutted by fire yesterday. Here's the story on Boston.com. He was awakened by a neighbor pounding on his door and discovered smoke seeping from the floor boards under his bed. Moments later the house was completely engulfed in flames. He got out barefoot in his pajamas. His mac with all his professional work was vaporized, as was his external hard drives that he used for backup. I am kicking myself for not getting him onto our mac beta, but he was waiting for the production release next month.

Believe me, this kind of thing is not an abstract possibility. It actually happens all the time, and when you think about what you've lost, it makes you sick.

Update 12/12/08: Here's a photo of the fire that was sent to me by a friend who lives a fews streets away.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Following up on my comments on Microsoft OneCare, I'd be interested to have you put on your wizard hats and tell me how the world is going to view companies like Carbonite five years hence. One scenario is that backup will be considered as part of the data security industry, and will be merged into anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware, and the like. Another view is that backup will be one of a number of data storage-related products, such as archiving, local backup, bare metal restore, smart document storage, and so forth. A third scenario is that backup is just such a big opportunity in itself (after all, there are 700 million Internet-connected PCs out there) that you can build a very large company doing nothing but online backup.

The first scenario suggests that backup companies will eventually be gobbled up by the anti-virus companies, just as Symantec acquired Swapdrive (now part of the Norton 360 suite). The second scenario is that backup is about storage, and the EMC acquisition of Mozy would argue that direction. They are already making noises about bundling backup with other storage products, such as Iomega. The third is that none of these guys will have the focus to do a really exceptional job at online backup, and well-funded pure-play companies like Carbonite will build brand and distribution and a new category will emerge dominated by pure-play vendors.

Anyone care to comment?

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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