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