A Note from David Friend, Co-founder and CEO
A couple of years ago, when my daughter was a sophomore in college, she called me, sobbing. Her laptop had been stolen, and along with it the term paper that she had been working on for 6 weeks! Her unsympathetic professor didn’t want to hear any excuses. It was only a few weeks later that my business partner Jeff’s wife’s hard drive died. They sent it off to one of those disk recovery services, which charged $1,100 to try to recover her files, but got nothing useful back. She ended up losing two years of baby pictures and financial records. Poof. Gone. She hadn’t bothered to back any of it up.
Why can’t backup be simple and affordable?
We decided it was high time to get our families to backup their PCs. Not so easy! Sure, we could spend Saturday afternoons burning a stack of CD ROMs, but who has the time? We could buy external hard drives for everyone’s computer, but they’re expensive, often complicated, and can get stolen or damaged very easily. We felt that online backup was the way to go because it’s professionally managed, secure, and always available. But existing online backup services were really complicated and very expensive. Why couldn’t someone offer one that was simple and affordable? Something without technical jargon, ongoing user involvement, and capacity limits... Couldn’t a backup service just run in the background, automatically protecting changes and new files on your PC? That idea became Carbonite.
Unlimited backup, one flat fee
People thought we were nuts offering unlimited backup for just $49.95 per year. Yes, we do lose money if you back up more than 100GB, but most people don’t, and it’s a small price to pay for the simplicity you get when you don’t have to make any decisions or compromises. It’s like buying an insurance policy for your data.
Since we launched Carbonite in 2006, we’ve backed up over 2 billion files. Today we back up more than 30 million new files every day. More importantly we have restored over 160 million files that would have been lost forever without us. We proved that simple is better – Carbonite has been featured in the The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other publications worldwide. Today Carbonite has customers in over 104 countries. We have more consumer and small business customers than any other online backup service. And we make sure that every one is a happy customer – In user satisfaction surveys, 97% of our users say they are either 'satisfied' or 'very satisfied' with Carbonite.
About safety and security
Sometimes people ask us "Why should I trust you with my most confidential files?" There are technical answers: encrypting your data before it leaves your PC, encrypted SSL data transmission, hacker-tested intrusion defenses, and so forth. But think about our motivations, too – if we ever compromised a user’s private information, we would soon be out of business. Maybe you can’t evaluate our technical defenses, but our business partners can and do. For example, if you pick up a copy of Microsoft Money, you’ll see the Carbonite logo right on the box. They trust us with their customers’ most private financial information. We also go to great pains to be sure we don’t lose your data – we store everything on redundant disk arrays that are 36 million times more reliable than the hard drive in your PC.
Try us, risk free
I hope you will give Carbonite a try. Almost 70% of the people who try Carbonite purchase a subscription within the first two weeks. 98% of our users say that they would recommend Carbonite to a friend or family member.
I hope to welcome you soon to a growing community of users who sleep better at night knowing that the contents of their PCs are safe. Please feel free to write to me at david.friend@carbonite.com if you have any questions.
Regards,
David Friend, CEO