A Note from David Friend, Co-founder and CEO
Several years ago, when my daughter was a sophomore in college, she called me, sobbing. Her hard drive had crashed and she lost the term paper that she had been working on for 6 weeks! Her unsympathetic professor didn’t want to hear any excuses. Just a few weeks earlier, my business partner Jeff’s wife’s laptop was stolen out of her car. 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 computers. 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 are expensive, often complicated, and can get stolen or damaged very easily. We felt that online backup was the way to go, because it is professionally managed, secure and always available. But existing online backup services were quite complicated and very expensive. Why couldn’t someone offer one that was simple and affordable? Something without technical jargon, requiring no ongoing user involvement, and capacity limits... Couldn’t a backup service just run in the background, automatically protecting changes and new files on your Computer? That idea became Carbonite.
Unlimited backup, one flat fee
People thought we were crazy to offer unlimited backup for just £41.95 per year. Yes, we do lose money if a user backs up more than 100 GB, but most people don’t, and that is a small price to pay for the simplicity our users get when you do not have to make any decisions or compromises. It is like buying an insurance policy for your data.
Since we launched Carbonite in 2006, we have backed up over 39 billion files. Today we back up more than 100 million new files every day. More importantly we have restored over 3.2 billion files that would have been lost forever without us. We proved that simple is better – Carbonite has been featured in the The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, New York Times and other publications worldwide. Today Carbonite has customers in over 120 countries. We have more consumer and small business customers than any other online backup service. And we do our best to ensure 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 Computer, 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 not evaluate our technical defenses, but our business partners can and do. For example, if you pick up a copy of Microsoft Money, you will see the Carbonite logo right on the box. Microsoft trusts us with their customers’ most private financial information. We also go to great lengths to be sure we do notlose your data – we store everything on redundant disk arrays that are 36 million times more reliable than the hard drive in your Computer.
Try us, risk free
I hope you will give Carbonite a try. Nearly 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 Computers are safe. Please feel free to email me at david.friend@carbonite.com if you have any questions or concerns.
Regards,
David Friend, CEO