May 25, 2007, 11:53 AM — Send your Storage question to David Hill today! | See other Storage tips
What seems to be the problem? Boot drives of laptops and desktop need backing up as they contain valuable consumer, small business, and even key enterprise data that individuals use. Backup for laptops and desktops often seems like the weather; everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. And that can be a problem as irreplaceable data is exposed to loss.
What do you need to know? The answer sounds simple. Copy all data (not the operating system or applications) over the Internet to a data center. Continually protect all changes without the user having to do a thing. Make restoration even at the granular file level easy. Charge a nominal price for this service.
That sounds too good to be true, but Carbonite has done it. (Disclosure: Carbonite briefed me as an industry analyst. Typically, individual companies are not discussed in storage tips, but Carbonite is a good illustration of the general principles of C: drive backup.) Carbonite charges only $50 a year for unlimited storage.
Now the skeptic would ask how this can be a profitable business? Aren't there people who will abuse the amount of data stored? The answer is yes; there are always a few people who will try to take advantage of a good deal. However, Carbonite reports that the average is still only about 5 GB. Can you still store 5 GB a year for $50 and make a profit on it? Do the math. If you use a 1 TB SATA drive, then 200 users can be housed on one disk drive and bring in $10,000 a year. However, there are other costs including the cost of the array in which the storage is housed, rental space in a data center cage at a third party site, support personnel, etc. So it is by no means all gravy, but it would seem to mean that a reasonable annual user fee can lead to a profitable business (which is probably why Carbonite just received $15 million in additional VC funding).
Carbonite's infrastructure is quite simple; it uses RAID 6 arrays in a public Internet-connected data center. No tape backup is done. What happens if Carbonite were to lose an array? Well, then it would have to backup user drives from scratch again. However, it is unlikely that both an array and a user machine would fail at the same time so no data is likely to be lost.
This application is a perfect use of RAID 6. In a large enough environment drives may fail even every day, but in a RAID 6 array3 failures would have to occur before the failed drives were rebuilt for any permanent loss of data to occur. Even 2 failures in the same array are unlikely so users would seem well protected. The protection is more than good enough and much better than not having any protection at all.
Carbonite also encrypts the data so privacy and confidentiality should not be an issue.
All in all Carbonite has a simple strategy, but one that seems to be working.
What can you do about it? Interesting enough, Carbonite has focused on the consumer market, but this type of product has a lot of potential for business as well. First, very small businesses can use it to protect the C: drives of its employees rather than having to put a more complicated solution in place.
Second, larger enterprises may be able to take advantage of the situation as well. For example, all mobile workers, say the sales force particularly, could use an online backup service to protect their valuable data. That may also apply to employees who work out of their homes rather than in an office.
Online backup has been available for a number of years, but the focus tended to be on the SMB market rather than on consumer PCs (although Carbonite is not the only player in the space). What was necessary was affordability in addition to simple, straightforward functionality. That challenge has been overcome. The only question now is whether the inertia of individuals and organizations to act can also be overcome. That is the unanswered question. But the data that may be saved may be yours.
