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

“

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

Those of you with laptops ought to read this CNN article about some of the hazards of traveling with your laptop. The biggest risk, of course, is damage. I have probably seen at least a half dozen laptops fall out of overhead compartments over the years. Then theft — Lenovo says that about 10% of all laptops get stolen or lost, most while traveling. Then there are absent minded people like me who leave them on the planes, trains, and (worse) taxis. (Last time I left one in a taxi, the driver found my name and called me a half hour later with an offer to make a special trip back with my laptop for a mere $500. He must have been about two blocks away because he got there in a couple of minutes. That's New York.) The CNN article also mentions the possibility of virus infections and malware courtesy of the public WiFi networks. I hadn't thought about this threat, but I guess it's yet another hazard.

The author doesn't really appreciate what a great solution online backup is for laptop owners. It's so much better than local backups. You don't have to lug around external hard drives or other equipment. When you are connected to the Internet, Carbonite just goes to work wherever you are. I know that the times I've lost laptops, at least I knew that I was backed up almost to the minute.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Our Mac version of Carbonite is still pretty new, but we just got a very good review from 
Pocket-lint.com, a very influential news and review site.

The reviewer noted the ease of use, the simplicity of the restore process, and the unobtrusiveness of Carbonite when it's running. The author also points out some of the advantages of online backup over a local external hard drive using Time Machine. If you're a Mac user, you may want to take a look at this review.

Click here to read the full review.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

We know our users love us, but will they vote for us? That is the question.

We get plenty of fan mail from users whose data we saved — we restore over 10 million files every month. That's a lot of saved bacon. But do they love us enough to give us their vote?

Every year, CNET runs the prestigious Webware 100 contest — really an industry popularity contest where users get to vote for their favorite applications. Over 5,000 companies got nominated by readers of CNET's Webware site. In the end there were only 300 finalists. And after 630,000 votes, only 100 winners. Carbonite was one of them. So thanks to all of you CNET readers out there who voted for Carbonite. You didn't let us down, and we will never let you down!

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

I found this very well-done explanation of Carbonite on YouTube. I don't know Cheryl Poirier, but she's very talented and fun to watch. Cheryl, if you're listening, send me an email! I'd love to thank you personally.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

We recently got an angry email from one of our customers who demanded that we stop advertising on a particular radio program because she did not like the views expressed by the host.

Before we started advertising on radio, I thought about this issue long and hard. I have pretty strong political views myself and I don't agree with some of what I hear on the radio. But nobody is being forced to listen. So I have concluded that I should do what I can as a private individual to support the causes I believe in. But I should not burden my company, my employees, and my investors, with the yoke of my own political positions. In the end, we at Carbonite have an important mission — building the world's greatest backup service. And it's not really for us to parse radicals from reactionaries, believers from atheists, blacks from whites, or arrogant from humble. Once you start going down that path, you might as well shutter your business and retire.

— 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:

“

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

Being a well-known technology guru is no guarantee that you're not going to get slammed with the same PC catastrophes that affect the rest of us. cNet's Don Reisinger learned this lesson after doing a demo on how to take apart your iMac and replace the hard drive. Long story short, after spending a significant amount of time and money, he ended up losing most of his files. Here's Don's conclusion for his readers: "I screwed up and it cost me money. Don't let this happen to you. Make sure you back up your files."

I consider myself to be pretty technically savvy, but a very similar thing happened to me back in 2005. In fact, it was a major factor in the decision to start Carbonite. Like most people, I had an external hard drive and every so often I would back up my PC to the hard drive. The problem, if you're like me, is that you do this religiously for a while, and then the backups get less and less frequent. I travelled a lot back then, and I didn't want to drag the hard drive on the road with me because I didn't want to lose it. When I was home, I was too tired or distracted to connect the hard drive and run a backup. When my hard drive finally crashed, I discovered that it had been three months since my last backup. Worse, I discovered that all the new folders that I had created since originally setting up the backup had not been added to the backup. So I lost nearly everything of value.

The reason I find online backup so compelling (I truly love it) is that it works ANYWHERE you connect to the Internet. So if I am sitting at Starbucks in the Dallas airport, Carbonite is backing up my work. And I don't know how many people are aware of this, but Carbonite was the first company to offer unlimited backup for a fixed price. The reason we went this route is so that the user wouldn't have to know where their files were stored to add them to their backup. The backup just happens automatically.

Ed Baig of USA Today recently wrote about how his own personal data loss as part of a larger column on passengers whose laptops were destroyed in the US Airways Flight 1549 emergency landing in the Hudson River. While Ed's data loss wasn't as dramatic of those onboard flight 1549, he luckily was using Carbonite and was easily able to restore his files. Carbonite's restore process is fast — even over a residential DSL, you can get 20-30GBs downloaded in less than a day. Because Ed was using Carbonite, his files were available right away. No waiting to have DVDs shipped in the mail or other similar kluges.

Has Carbonite saved your bacon, personally or professionally? Let me know your story via e-mail at David (dot) Friend (at) carbonite.com or in the comments.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

A few months ago Carbonite introduced a new capability in customer support called "GoToAssist" and I wanted to say a few words about it.

Carbonite has three ways for you to get support: free email, free live chat, and Premium phone support, which costs $19.95 per year. Over the past three months, we have been carefully monitoring all three to determine which solves our customers' problems the fastest. The winner, surprisingly, is not phone, but Live Chat. In many cases, what really makes the difference is our GoToAssist capability. This feature lets our customer support reps actually look at your computer screen remotely, diagnose your problem and fix it. You don't have to sit there on the phone while the rep asks you to describe what you're seeing, and then tells you what buttons to push. He just does it himself.

We've been training all our people to use this capability, and we're now pretty much up to speed. Our objective is to keep wait times under 2 minutes, though it does vary at different times of the day. We're graduating a new class of support reps in May, so times should get even faster. I hope that by this Fall customer support answer times will be almost instantaneous. We've been spending a lot of money on systems that keep all our reps busy either answering emails, chats, or the phone.

Below is a letter that we got from one of our customers concerning her satisfaction with a GoToAssist session. This is the kind of outcome we strive for at all times.

“

Dear Mr. Robison,

I wanted to express my appreciation for Ulysses and his assistance with an ongoing problem in restoring Carbonite to our computer. After emails with clear instructions and then finally using the Citrix GoToAssist program, he was finally able to restore the program. It took him about 30 minutes in order to figure out the source of the problem, and then he remedied the problem.

Thank you for able assistants, and in particular for Ulysses.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Carbonite is suing a vendor over some equipment that we bought back in 2006 and 2007 (see posts below). From a news standpoint, we thought that this was an inconsequential story about a minor trade dispute. Wrong. It has turned into a PR fiasco for Carbonite, and highlights the danger of Internet "news" where every writer is just copying what they have read elsewhere and NOBODY is doing what a real reporter does: check the primary sources.

TechCrunch and literally hundreds of other blogs sensationalized our lawsuit by implying that 7500 Carbonite customers had lost data (the real number was 54) and that it is a current ongoing problem (it was a year or two ago and we no longer buy servers from Promise).

Throughout all of this, NOT ONE person bothered to pick up the phone and call me to get the facts. Few if any read what was actually in the lawsuit. The story simply passed from one blogger to another, getting juicier along the way.

Newspapers have been folding up around the country. If all we're left with are Internet bloggers who get their material by reading what others have already said, who is actually going to do the investigative reporting? Who is going to call the parties involved and ask, "Is this true what I've read on the Internet?" Where are the newsroom editors who will redline a reporter's story, asking "What is your source?" While I don't believe there was any malice regarding Carbonite, what's to stop someone from starting a malicious rumor that spreads like wildfire?

My email address is right on our web site. It wouldn't have been hard to call or write asking for comment and a copy of the actual lawsuit. News on the Internet is free, but it's pretty clear that you get what you pay for.

I would like to commend one tech writer who had the good manners to post an apology on my blog.

“

I received an email from Dave Friend today regarding a post on my technical blog (http://techtips.timlaytonllc.com). I had written a brief article about the loss of data for 7,500 carbonite.com customers. I first learned of the data loss via my Twitter feed (twitter.com/timlaytonsr) and then I performed a google search confirming the story. All of the various stories basically read the same so I felt comfortable publishing my article based on the vast number of what I believed to be reliable sources that I found via the web.

After reading Dave's email in detail we exchanged several conversations back and forth. I quickly realized that I had not gotten the full story via the many sources that I used to research my article. 

I have lived long enough to realize that there are usually two sides to every pancake. It is very unfortunate when hard-working reliable organizations like Carbonite experience negative and damaging press when all of the facts were clearly not reported by the masses.

I am writing today to offer my humble apology to Dave Friend and the Carbonite team. I learned a valuable lesson today — so thank you...

Regards,
Tim Layton

Thank you Tim.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite