February 03, 2010, 12:21 PM — Carbonite Inc. today announced a new online backup service aimed at small businesses with a new pricing model and additional features, including encryption.
Carbonite debuted its consumer online backup service in 2006. The company said it has already backed up more than 39 billion files in its consumer business, including data from about 100,000 small businesses that pay $54.95 per year for unlimited storage.
But since Carbonite's consumer service doesn't always meet business requirements, the company is offering Carbonite Pro, which provides features "that small businesses have requested."
"Now we have a version of Carbonite that incorporates everything that these small-business users have been asking for: no per-PC fees, administrative tools that are simple enough for any office manager to use, the ability to back up external drives and priority support," Carbonite CEO and co-founder David Friend said in a statement. "Nobody wants to spend a lot of time or money backing up computers, so we've made Carbonite Pro a simple and affordable online backup service for businesses." With Carbonite Pro, files are encrypted before they leave a user's computer and if an employee leaves a company, an administrator can quickly disable their access to backups. The Pro service can be centrally administered through a single dashboard that shows the status of each employee's backup. Recovering data is managed through a Restore Wizard that guides administrators through a step-by-step process to find lost or damaged files.
Carbonite Pro users can log into their accounts on CarbonitePro's Web page from any computer with online access and download any file in their backups.
Carbonite Pro starts with a free, one-month trial of the service , after which pricing is based on a tiered structure based on how much data a business chooses to store. There are no licensing, set-up or per-computer fees.
For example, Carbonite Pro charges $10 per month for up to 20GB of data, $100 per month for between 100GB and 149GB of data and $250 a month for 300GB to 499GB of data stored. Full pricing information is available from the Carbonite Pro site .
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld . Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian , send e-mail to lmearian@computerworld.com or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed .
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