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Carbonite Announces Upgrade of its Online PhotoBackup Service
New Version Features Simpler User Interface and Backs Up 19 Photo and Movie
File Formats
Carbonite Is The Only Inexpensive, “Set and Forget” Backup Service
BOSTON, MASS. – March 22, 2006 – Carbonite, Inc., the company dedicated to simple,
inexpensive, automatic PC backup over the Internet, announced today that it has
upgraded its online PhotoBackup service and is offering the new version free to
current trial and paid subscribers. This latest version of the service backs up
nineteen photo and movie file formats and includes a simplified, easier-to-use interface.
The new features include automatic backup of:
- Standard picture formats including JPEG, RAW, DNG, PNG, PSD
- Short movie clips including MPEG, AVI, MOV, ASF formats
- Proprietary raw photo formats for cameras from Canon, Fuji, Kodak, Minolta, Nikon,
Olympus, and Sony (CRW, CR2, RAF, DCR, KDK, MRW, NEF, OPF, SRF)
PhotoBackup costs $3 per month, or just $29.95 per year. Carbonite is offering free
trials at www.carbonite.com, and with the purchase of a digital camera at Staples
stores. Current subscribers to Carbonite’s PhotoBackup service can upgrade their
accounts from a pop-up bubble that will appear on their PC desktops.
According to David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, “The demand for Carbonite PhotoBackup
has been robust. In listening to our first customers, we have improved the user
interface and expanded the file formats PhotoBackup supports. Our initial demand
has been spurred by our ease-of-use, but also by horror stories of people losing
family treasures to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.”
Carbonite PhotoBackup is the only service that backs up all of a customer’s photos
for a fixed monthly service fee through a completely automatic, “set and forget”
service. Any time new photos are added to a PC (or old ones are edited), Carbonite
finds them within seconds and starts to back them up over the Internet. In order
to protect its customers’ privacy, photos are encrypted before being transmitted
to Carbonite’s secure data centers.
Digital photographers today have an average of 2,800 photos on their hard drives,
using roughly 2.4 gigabytes of disk space, according to a survey conducted by Carbonite.
Added CEO, David Friend, “A real backup service ought to find all your pictures
automatically and just back them up without your having to think about it. To upload
2,800 photos to a photo sharing service like Kodak’s EasyShare, or Snapfish requires
you to hand-select each of the 2,800 photos. That could take days of constant work.
And you need to remember to repeat that process every time you take new pictures.
People just don’t do that – it’s too much of a pain.”
Carbonite will launch a comprehensive PC backup service that will backup all data
(office documents, photos, music, etc.) on a customer’s PC in late April. The service
is likely to be priced at $5 per month (or $49.95/year) with no pre-determined storage
limit.
About Carbonite
Carbonite was founded in 2005 in order to provide Internet-based Backup for Everyone™.
Although data loss is a very common problem, few people backup their PCs. Burning
CDs is tedious and error-prone. Outboard hard drives are expensive and vulnerable
to theft, fire, and viruses. Business-oriented online backup services are too complex
and expensive for consumers.
At Carbonite, we believe PC users shouldn’t have to think about backup. Our mission
is to provide an inexpensive, reliable and truly easy-to-use solution for the mainstream
PC user; one that is simple, safe and always on™.
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