I’m sorry to hear you’ve been having trouble getting through to our support staff. We’ve been adding staff and making other changes (such as introducing live chat at carbonite.com/chat) to speed up the process.

If you are still having trouble, please send a note to customersupport @ carbonite.com with ATTN: LEN in the subject line and I’ll make sure your issue gets resolved ASAP.

Sincerely,

Len Pallazola
Manager, Customer Service Systems
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com

I use carbonite for my SMB, but they havent figured out that I am a valuable customer. Their technical support is very bad (poor responses, delays of up to a week) which gives you very low confidence on their support if you actually needed to do a critical restore…

I have sent in 3 queries, but only gotten a template response (re-install…duhhh? I told you I did it).

There is no technical forum, which is a basic thing you’d expect from any consumer facing tech company – either that, or get a decent support staff.

https://www.idrive.com/p=1stsentry

Simple online backup only provides the simple backup-only component of online data management as a compulsory fulfillment of what’s so far been defined as reqiusite… This is bound to change and it’s clearly evident that it’s at least beginning to change.

Archive is next on the critical path of PC users’ needs. Services that only offer ‘unlimited backup’ are not prepared for the point when the customer file systems they’ve been replicating begin to reach their finite capacity.

I agree with Steve and that the discussion/debate surrounding the market viability of online storage versus simple plug-and-play online backup (and what must be true in order for a given online backup solution to really be considered ‘plug-and-play…’) is one that deserves more airtime.

It’s fairly obvious that simple backup-only solutions have seen rampant success. But it’s also obvious to note the number of new solutions now emerging to offer simple online backup as a matter of course, along with other powerfully useful functionality, so I also agree with Michael that the real addressable market is still materializing.

Our non-expiring free Tilana Reserve™ account offers 2GB of space for use as backup or archive storage. The account holder can use it natively for backup-only or backup-plus-archive (deleted files and version history), in addition to unlimited file and folder sync for an unlimited number of computers on the same account.

Our $49.95/yr account offers the same ‘unlimited backup’ per computer offered by the leaders, but with the ability to delete protected content without losing it from the data center as well. Customers are simply charged $0.50/GB/mo for anything they want to keep stored in the data center, but no longer need on their computers. Our multi-computer sync account includes 30GB for the same $49.95/yr and $0.50/GB/mo over…

______________________
Derek Finley
VP Marketing

derek@tilana.com

Tilana Systems Corp.
http://www.tilana.com

Online backup – even to home users – does not work like Skype. It requires much more caring and feeding. That is the nature of the beast. It simply does not lend itself to be a absolute commodity play because of the support intensive nature of this domain. Hence, it is no wonder the one who got the maximum brand recognition, Mozy, decided to sell out quite quickly. We believe Mozy was overwhelmed by the support intensive nature of the backup business and could not have sustained themselves for too long without raising massive capital – like what Carbonite has been doing.

The cost of (properly) supporting a customer is a finite number that doesn’t, in our experience, converge to zero very soon. While every software vendor obviously takes great effort to ensure their software is as ‘plug & play’ as possible, the number of use cases is simply too much to not warrant support. We consistently see this across our rapidly growing base of over 900 service providers & their customers – in spite of the fact that many people choose us for our usability led design.

Hence, we believe the real ‘business’ play will however be in the business segment – with SMBs leading the way and mid-market/enterprise following suit later. And yes, this will be support intensive – for the foreseeable future, at least! On a related note, a recent freewheeling chat with our CEO is available at http://www.backupanytime.com/blog/2008/08/26/backupanytime-interview-with-sekar-vembu-of-vembu-technologies/ – it touches upon some of the views articulated in this thread.

Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan
President
Vembu Technologies
http://www.vembu.com

While demand is growing swiftly and supporting businesses like Carbonite, ElephantDrive, Mozy, and ProSoftNet, the real addressable market is still materializing. The questions are 1) how long will it take for the bulk of the market to materialize, and 2) who will have the most compelling offering. There is debate over both questions.

In terms of the market timing, I believe the the hype is warranted and that the next 18-24 months will be the beginning of a major inflection point in the amount of personal data that is stored online. All these players seem to agree but there are certainly nay-sayers who focus on the problems of trust and reliability of cloud services.

In terms of the right product mix, I believe that the most compelling product offering will need to extend beyond simple “fire-and-forget” backup. This is both because of Steve’s (comment above) astute observation that there really is no such thing as “fire-and-forget” (a backup is only as good as your last restore), AND because I think that end users will look for one easy to use data service that provides backup, access, and organization/sharing across devices. There does not appear to be a consensus among the existing providers about this and I look forward to seeing the end users make the call.

Om – I would love to discuss more offline if you are interested.

This is interesting. Why don’t you give a brief experience summary of the online backup services you have used? You know, like the way you describe your experience with iphones, gmail etc..

Raghu

http://www.mozy.com

I think the set-and-forget is more for home users I think. Even then I think, the back-ups are still hit-and-miss. Even though I have tried many a few services, it is hard to say that I love one over the other.

I think the only service that works as advertised is Dropbox, though it is not a back-up service: more of syncing-solution with storage.

What service do you use?

Disagree: With some of the the points on ‘set it, forget it’ solutions.

As much as many would like to think otherwise, backups are simply not a ‘set it, forget it’ kinda service. While this might, at best, be true for the home/SoHo market which can perhaps afford to be relatively lax about their data and lose that MP3 that they can download again (doesn’t apply for that photo of your grandmum, though), it cannot/doesn’t apply to business users who need more that a ‘set it forget it’ option for mission critical data like mail & databases.

Which is why, there’s a related boom in service provider assisted online backups – or managed online backups, i.e., a role for the channel.

Look around you… services like Symantec Protection Network, eVault (now Seagate), even Mozy and ‘software for service providers’ vendors like Asigra, eVault and Vembu – they’re all focused on the channel.

I think its even dangerous to suggest that businesses can manage with a configure & forget service. Backups simply don’t work that way – they seem destined to remain relatively painful & high touch, in spite of what vendors may try & make us think otherwise.

My 0.02 – from a service provider’s trenches

S

I did not say that we make a ‘hefty’ profit, I just mentioned that we are profitable!

I do agree with David Friend’s comments that online backup is here to stay and it solves a very real user problem.

But online backup is not the only possible success story in storage. Pay as you use storage service S3 is apparently very successful. There may be many untapped opportunities in cloud storage with this model with various access options including open protocols such as WebDAV, NFS, CIFS etc. (although some of these protocols may need to be tuned for WAN as they are designed for LAN.

There are other niches in storage that may succeed. For example, we are working towards a product that EXTENDS desktop applications to the web.
You can use your Access or Quickbooks applications and use them in multiuser mode with users spread across geography using cloud storage (http://www.fogdrive.com).

Raghu Kulkarni