We just got another 5-star review, this one in IT Reviewed, an important online magazine for IT professionals and technorati. We really appreciate it when reviewers ask a lot of questions and do their homework. This writer, Chris Harris, really appreciated our ease-of-use.

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If you've decided to use an online backup service, Carbonite is the best in the business. There are many positive points that the service provides including ease of use, the security of off-site storage, and low cost. There's no better online solution than Carbonite. Its hand-holding approach and close integration with Windows makes it accessible to all.

To read the entire review, click here

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Kim Komando sent me this letter that she got from one of her listeners:

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Dear Kim:

Not really a question...What was I (NOT)thinking????? My husband and I were in Hawaii on business when we heard there was a wildfire in Santa Barbara — near our neighborhood. While trying to keep the panic down, talking with the house sitter who was caring for our two dogs and cat...I suddenly realized — OUR COMPUTERS!!! I had the laptop, but all the real stuff was on my external drive. That little black box..sitting on my desk in a house that could burn down. Our house sitter had already evacuated and wouldn't be able to get back in — perhaps our niece's husband could make his way to and in the house to retrieve the box? He did get it but I couldn't help but think of the ramifications had he not been successful.

The bottom line — I not only GOT how valuable Carbonite was — but I also GOT how stupid of me to be sitting at the airport trying to get back home and have to worry about losing all our data. It's day three and my Carbonite is still backing up. Kim — many thanks for recommending it and oh yes — we still have our house (and Carbonite).

- Maria

By chance, one of Carbonite's investors, Floyd Bradley, lives in the same neighborhood and sent me this picture from his back yard. Better believe he has Carbonite on ALL his computers!

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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

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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

I got an email this morning from a long-time user complaining about our recent price increase: "It's great that you've released Remote Access, but why does that justify a price increase?" As you may know, we recently increased our yearly subscription fee by $5, to $54.95. The simple fact is that the size of our average user's backup is growing by about 3% per month. That's 36% more data every year, and consequently we have to buy 36% more disk space and pay for 36% more bandwidth. Luckily the price of disk storage is also coming down, so we can keep our price increase to just 10% after 3 years. There's a new generation of less expensive 2TB drives coming out later this year that should allow us to hold this price for quite a long time — certainly several years. Meanwhile, we're still 10% less expensive on an annual basis than the companies that are hawking $4.95/mo ($59.40/yr).

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

External hard drives definitely have their place for doing backups. But most people don't realize that inexpensive consumer-grade hard drives fail just as frequently as the hard drives built into their computers. And, if they are right next to your computer, they will typically share its fate in the event of theft, fire, power surges, etc. Now here's another thing to worry about: firmware bugs.

IDG news service reported last month that several models of Seagate's popular Barracuda and DiamondMax external hard drives have faulty firmware that is causing the hard drives to "freeze" under certain conditions. The article that I read refers to this condition as "bricked," a term I hadn't run across before but which is amusingly descriptive of what you can do with a frozen hard drive. Seagate is a great company, so I'm sure they'll fix this problem, but there's only so much you can do when there is a single point of failure.

As I've said in the past, any single hard drive is going to be much more vulnerable to data loss than the RAID arrays that Carbonite uses (which are 36,000,000 times more reliable than a single hard drive because of redundancy). So while external drives are a good and inexpensive way to store big files such as ripped movies or TV shows, I wouldn't consider them safe enough to store my irreplaceable photos or financial records.

— 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

Our friend Leo Laporte finally got me going on Twitter (dfriend). We've had a company Twitter account (carbonitebackup) for a while. I can tell that I'm never going to be able to keep up with this – way too much information. But reading through recent posts is very informative, and you're welcome to follow me if you want occasional updates.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

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 blog 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:

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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

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