Carbonite Expands Online Backup

By James Rogers, February 6, 2008 5:46 PM

Online backup vendor Carbonite has overhauled its PCBackup software, touting a low-cost alternative to EMC's Mozy technology and a way for users to emerge unscathed from the trauma of hard drive crashes and stolen laptops.

PCBackup 3.5, launched earlier today, is the latest Windows backup offering from the startup, which aims its products squarely at small businesses, the SOHO market, and consumers.

"Online backup is not a new concept, but we were really the first ones to do it in a way that is simple for the individual and affordable," claims Swami Kumaresan, the vendor's vice president of marketing.

Carbonite's main rival in this space is Mozy, which was acquired by EMC for $76 million last year, and is now at the forefront of the storage giant's SaaS efforts.Unlike Mozy, which prices its MozyPro offering at $3.95 per month plus 50 cents per Gbyte of data stored, Carbonite is pushing a flat pricing model for PCBackup. In an attempt to make online backup less complicated for users, the startup charges $49.95 a year for unlimited storage space.

"Most mainstream users dont even know what a gigabyte is," says Kumaresan, explaining that the pricing model is "all about keeping things simple and affordable."

PCBackup enhancements announced today include the ability to search through three months of backed up files, backup scheduling, and a wizard for restoring data in the event of a stolen laptop or hard drive crash.

"In that situation, users are in an emotional state, so they need to handhold a little bit," says Kumaresan. "[The restore wizard] goes through the process of installing Carbonite on a PC –- it's a little bit of an emotional crutch for users."

The vendor has also added a feature called "file versioning" to PCBackup 3.5, which lets users go back 90 days to restore a version of a file, unlike the previous version of the software, which could restore only the most recently backed up file."I have spoken to people that use specialized accounting applications, for example, that often get a corrupt file so they have to roll back to earlier versions of it," explains Kumaresan.

The vendor also added backup scheduling to its product mix today. "There are situations where people want to schedule their backups to avoid times when their backup might disrupt the network and take up bandwidth," says Kumaresan, explaining that this is typically between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Despite facing a stiff challenge from the EMC behemoth, Kumaresan told Byte and Switch that there is room for both PCBackup and Mozy.

"My sense is that EMC's intentions are to move into the large enterprises," he says. "I think that they will be successful there, but we're focused on small business, SOHO, and mainstream customers."

Although he would not name any specific customers, Kumaresan says that Carbonite's customer list is "in six figures" and spans 100 countries across the globe.The exec also divulged some roadmap details today, explaining that a MAC-based version of PCBackup will be available in the summer, as will software for backing up USB data. "I would say that we will end up doing that within the next two to three months," he says.

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