I appreciate you posting some direct facts about this topic. I actually agree with your blog post that it can be very frustrating when bloggers like myself just keep spreading the same story around without doing any further investigation. I think people like me are just used to not getting responses from executives at companies with press like this. However, I want to address some points you made in your comment:

1) I did not realize this is much an old issue. I wish the Globe article would have stated when this event actually happened. Obviously you have moved to something that is much more realiable.

2) I think that is amazing that you were able to get all but 54 users data back. As you stated in your blog you were able to get the 6946+ users to rebackup their data before a failure happened. That is a fast recovery! I am just surprised that you don’t have a mirrored site for your data though incase of a complete RAID failure?

3) I probably wasn’t very clear in my post, but I wasn’t trying to say that you aren’t making money. I should have been more clear that I was more concerned with low price points offering UNLIMITED storage. When you can’t control how much data users will backup, you are just playing odds that most users won’t abuse it. I just don’t like seeing services continue to be increase price when they have estimated the storage too low when data usage will do nothing but grow. You just recently increased your pricing according to your blog post because of increased customer storage usage. Maybe “Just-In-Time” pricing is the way to go?

Dave – thank you again for personally posting on my little blog your story. I know I appreciate as well as other readers more information from the source!

-Brent

1) This is not a current issue — it relates to problems we had back in 2007 with Promise. We have long since stopped purchasing their hardware.

2) We didn’t lose 7500 customers’ files. In the end, we recovered 99.6% of the files. Only 54 users lost any data, and even then it was only a small amount. Nearly all are still customers.

With respect to our price, we make good margins at $54.95 per year. That’s why we were able to raise over $45 million of venture capital. Scale makes a difference — Carbonite has a huge and highly automated back end. We currently back up over 30 billion files and back up over 100 million new files every day. At that scale, you definitely make money at $54.95 per year. There is more detail on my blog at http://www.carbonite.com/blog. We include free live chat and email support, but we charge $20/year for priority phone support. Our product is VERY simple, so it doesn’t require too much hand-holding.

Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com