Carbonite: Online Photo Backup

I've been trying out a new service from a Boston-based startup called Carbonite for backing up your photos automatically to their servers. Founded in 2005 by two experienced entrepreneurs, David Friend and Jeff Flowers, Carbonite is funded by the angel group Common Angels.

Backup of home PCs is a huge issue/opportunity that has to date seen solutions that have been either too complicated, too expensive or both. In my initial experience the cost has not been an issue since it is a free trial (though pricing is said to be around $2.50/month for unlimited storage) and the Carbonite team has done a good job of minimizing the complexity. The intial product focus is pictures though Outlook and document backup is coming in the future.

The Carbonite client app needs to be downloaded and installed on your system and it searches your system for pictures and automatically starts backing them up. I took advantage of the exclusions option accessed through the Carbonite InfoCenter to restrict the backup to the My Documents and My Shared Documents folders which still resulted in an upload of 25,000 image files. The client app can be set up to run in the background and there is even a Performace option so that it makes less use of your bandwidth if you are running VOIP. That's a nice touch.

Once Carbonite has scoured your system for picture files they are marked with a little yellow dot which means they are awaiting backup. Once they have been uploaded, they dot turns to green. I have to say it feels quite comforting to look at all my folders in My Pictures and to see all green dots. I backup regularly to a 250 Gb external firewire drive but it is not the same as having them off in a virtual vault. I guess the real proof would only be discovered if you ever needed to recover your pictures.

This is very neccessary element to deal with the explosion of personal digital media. Carbonite's challenge is to build a trustworthy and simple to use service that will fill this need at a price consumers are willing to pay. One of the other challenges they face is their startup status. Some people have already experienced their data being lost when their dot.com service locked their doors one morning when the investor's pulled the plug. Carbonite has been smart to gain distribution through Stapes which is a trusted brand. Is this something best offered by a Kodak or a Microsoft? Maybe so, in the meantime Carbonite should keep developing their technology and growing their user base to make themselves an attractive "buy vs. build" option for one of those companies.