Comcast’s business services brought in $2.4 billion in 2012, up 34 percent from the previous year. That’s only 6 percent of the company’s cable sales, but it’s growing at almost 6 times the pace of total sales. And those customers were asking Comcast for choices on document storage, security and other resources, which led to the ISP building Upware.

While spokesman Charlie Douglas declined to give specific financial details associated with the app store, he did say it would be a revenue-generating service for Comcast. It will also be great for the partners who will have their services listed for Comcast’s business customers. Those companies so far include:

• Data Backup – Carbonite, DigitalSafe and Mozy.
• Data Security – Norton and Websense.
• Collaboration – Box, Microsoft, Soonr and YouSendIt (see disclosure.)

This is a good example of how a service provider can add value for its end users — value that it can monetize beyond a monthly broadband fee. Comcast has been pretty aggressive about adding connected home products on the residential side as well as beefing up it’s pay TV service to compete more with web-based on-demand services.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream
• New challenges for the IT organization
• A near-term outlook for big data

Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman

Backblaze, the 5-year-old company that backs up everything on your PC for $5 per month, has snagged $5 million in funding from TMT Investments, an investment house out of the U.K.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Backblaze will use the money to staff up and expand its marketing efforts — and attack the masses of people who still do not back up their computers, CEO Gleb Budman said in a recent interview. Backblaze competes most directly with Mozy, now owned by VMware (via EMC) and Carbonite.

Taking outside money was not done lightly. The company was bootstrapped for its first year and a half and then it took in $390,000 in seed money. The company has been profitable since the early days, Budman said.

“When we started we explicitly didn’t want venture funding for a few reasons — we worried that going through the process would get distracting and we worried about handing off too much control and equity and mostly we worried about the impact on our culture,” Budman said

Now, with five years under its belt and 16 employees, he feels the culture is set and the time is right to fund more growth. The company will remain stingy — it will take half of the funding now and the other half in a year.

“We run our own cloud, we do our own support. For the first few years we killed ourselves. We were lean and crazy and there was definitely a risk of burn out. Now we’re at good place. We all work hard, but at a marathon pace, not a sprint,” he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream
• Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?
• A near-term outlook for big data

Get settled in for the long haul

One of the key downsides of online backup is the time it takes to actually get your initial backup into the cloud. Some companies such as CrashPlan and DollyDrive allow you to ship a physical hard drive to “seed” your backup, greatly reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred online initially.

If you aren’t with these companies or want an alternative, you can create a tiered backup strategy. If you do it all at once, it can take months and you’ll find you’re missing key files when you need them. Here’s what I typically recommend in terms of a staged approach for the average user:

1. Work first. Realize that while most people say pictures are the most important items to back up, those typically take the longest to upload. I prefer to start with the Documents folder. These typically are probably the hardest to recreate, as well as being time sensitive. This is the folder you’re also working in most often, so you may be more likely to accidentally overwrite things. If you use Outlook or Entourage, exclude the Microsoft User Data as the database for those email programs tends to be huge.

Keep an eye on the backup program, and make sure it not only successfully backed up that initial folder, but is also correctly backing up changes daily. Typically this takes just a few days. Once you have that folder backing up, the next folder I suggest is the Desktop folder. For convenience (and a bit of poor training), many users keep documents on the desktop rather than the Documents folder.

2. App and system settings. Next is the Application Support and Preferences folder in your user library folder. These contain the settings for your various programs as well as some supporting data files.

After you’ve got those critical files happily updating it’s time for the bigger folders such as email and the rest of your library folder. Email, of course is very important and annoying if lost, but often it’s already stored elsewhere, like on your email provider’s servers.

3. Photos and home video. Once you’ve got the documents and various support files and folders, it’s time to tackle the photos. More and more users keep copies (albeit at a lower quality) on services such as Facebook and Flickr, as well as sync photos to their iPhone, so it probably isn’t so urgent for most. What I do recommend is to spend some time and back up your photos manually by periodically burning them to disc from iPhoto. Be sure to keep these disks offsite in case of disaster, maybe with friends or family.

4. Music last — or not at all. Finally, after these elements are successfully updating each day, it’s time to back up the rest of your hard drive and can go with the software’s suggested recommendations. You might think about excluding your iTunes folder, however. With iCloud and iTunes Match, you might consider waiting on these folders or not backing it up at all. A large media library can choke a backup system for months without a large return on investment. While Carbonite or Mozy is trying to back up a movie you ripped off of DVD to entertain the kids on your last road trip, it’s missing the actual pictures from the trip. Which are more important?

General tips

A general recommendation I have for the initial load is to upgrade your broadband speed, at least for a month or so. Most companies will give you a free trial period of around 30 days at a higher speed in hopes you keep the service. Take advantage of that and upload like crazy, although be careful if you use a metered service not to exceed your monthly bandwidth limit.

Make sure your Mac doesn’t go to sleep during the initial backup period. I’ve seen clients subscribe to an online service and never get an initial backup because the computer is shut down when not in use. Unfortunately, they often learn this when they try to restore after a disaster. Ouch.

Each hard drive is unique, so your data may not conform to these guidelines, but consider a game plan for your initial backup and make sure that you stagger that backup so at least something new is being backed up every month. Nothing hurts more than to have a data disaster and find you’ve been paying for a service and it hasn’t been backing up the stuff you want.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?
• The Backup Barrier: Obstacles to Online Storage Strategies
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

The race for mind and market share among cloud storage providers continued with Monday’s news that some Hewlett-Packard PCs will come with an easy on-ramp to Box’s cloud storage service. But as cloud-storage startups court mobile-device-toting business users, how effective can a PC partnership really be?

With this latest deal, business users buying the HP Compaq 6200 or 6005 Pro Series or 8200 Elite Series PCs get a free Box account with 10 GB of cloud storage.

That gives Box entry into the SMB and enterprise business accounts targeted by these HP PC models. But at the same time Box competitors like Dropbox seem to have progressed beyond the PC to hotter-selling mobile devices. Last month Dropbox announced $250 million in funding to fuel its effort to integrate its technology into phones, cars and other devices.

Palo Alto, Calif.–based Box is trying to nurture an ecosystem of developers and other partners to validate its cloud offering. Last month, it formally announced its Box Innovation Network,  aka “/bin,” and $2 million in funding to encourage developers to build on Box APIs.

In October, Box CEO Aaron Levie previewed the network, saying that the company already had significant third-party support.

Our platform is already used by a couple thousand developers with 150 apps . . . we want to expand that. We want it to be dead simple to share and collaborate around your stored data . . . there is far too little innovation oriented towards enterprise software.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• New challenges for the IT organization
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities

Cheap-and-easy cloud storage has become a heated battleground both in the consumer and business computing realm, with companies like Carbonite, Dropbox and Box.net duking it out for both business and home users.

With Backblaze 2.0, users can now blow by the previous 9GB file size limit and store files of unlimited size. In fact, they can now store whole VMware images or other VMs for the same cost, said Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze.

For most consumers, the old 9GB file size limit was probably not a big deal since most files don’t hit that limit — although people wanting to save Blu-rays would have had an issue. The new version also eliminates restrictions on file types. The older version was coded not to accept .iso or some other system files.

Another new perk is automatic throttling that checks the user’s available bandwidth. “We never want to use 100 percent of the bandwidth available since we want to leave something for other applications, but we check the bandwidth and adjust based on what’s available,” Budman said.

As Derrick Harris reported in July, Backblaze can offer such cheap services because it built its own infrastructure – its own white box servers, its own storage software layer — because it found alternative infrastructure, including Amazon’s S3 storage service, was too expensive.

Image courtesy of Backblaze.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

Online-backup provider Carbonite priced its initial public offering last night, despite the turmoil in the financial markets. And yes, it priced at $10 per share — on the low end of its expectations, which were downgraded Wednesday from a high of $17 — but it did make it out. This morning, it opened up at 10.93 per share and by 1 pm ET it was at $11.99, indicating that while the financial buyers of its shares were cautious, the public market still seemed eager to snap up stock in an IPO amid what appears to be an overall market rally.

After S&P downgraded the U.S. debt, the stock markets took a dive on Monday, with some newly public companies getting hammered. At least five other hopefuls have pulled their own public offerings. So now Carbonite is out — although it arrvives in an uncertain public market after raising 40 percent less than it originally hoped for. But at least it’s out, seems to be the message CEO David Friend had to share in this Street.com video. At least it has some capital to ride out a recession and can maybe use its stock for deals.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization

Deals shares a lot of the functionality of the more full featured eBay mobile app, but it specifically targets eBay’s daily deals, and any zero bid items that have less than four hours remaining in their auction times, with no reserve price and free or fixed rate shipping, and a total price that includes shipping costs. In other words, with the deals the app presents, you pay exactly the price listed.

The app opens with a few featured daily deals already displayed in rotation on the main screen. You can then click on category buttons at the bottom, choosing between apparel, sports, computers, instruments, jewelry, electronics, collectibles, and photography to view auctions from those categories that fit the criteria I mentioned above.

The built-in searches are great for idle browsing (and possibly ruinous for those with strong impulse buying urges), but if you want to target items more specifically, you can either search on the fly, or create and save your own custom search. Creating a custom search allows you to specify keywords, a category, and a price range, and also assign an icon that will be displayed alongside the other default categories at the bottom of the app screen.

If you’d rather not save your search, there’s a magnifying glass icon at the top of the app that you can use instead to launch a one-time search. Next to that is another button that lists all the deals found in your most recent search. In use, I found that there wasn’t enough search criteria to ensure truly focused results. I’d love the addition of an “at least x dollars” filter, so that when I search for “iPhone,” for example, I can filter out most accessories and replacement parts.

Finally, you can sign in with your eBay account so that you can pay on the fly for any deal you find via the app with PayPal. The idea behind the app, after all, is to make sure eBay customers have access to the site no matter where they are. Apparently eBay mobile wasn’t driving enough business, and the Deals app is designed to remedy that situation. The app is free in the U.S. store (iTunes link), but beware the hidden costs of shopaholism.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Got a Cable Subscription? There’ll Be an App for That
• When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG

If you look at the amount of advertising out there these days, you’d think the Mac vs. PC war is a mere slap fight compared to the war being raged for your data backups. They want your data, and they want it now!

In one corner you have Mozy, which shares corporate DNA with former Mac backup champion, Retrospect. In the other corner is Carbonite, which began supporting the Mac this year. Mozy had almost a 2-year head start on Carbonite, but the software race doesn’t always go to the first one out of the gate. I gave both products an intense 3-month test. Which one deserves your data? Read on.

Round One: Staying Power

I wouldn’t trust my data to a brand-new company that could go out of business when I need my data (X-Drive, anyone?). Carbonite and Mozy are both well established. Of the two, Carbonite has the better name recognition, referencing Han Solo’s preservation in the “Star Wars” series. But Carbonite also seems to attract bad press like the Millennium Falcon attracted mynocks.

A server failure in 2007 lead to quite a few lawsuits, but according to Carbonite, no data was lost. Additionally, Carbonite was caught using “the Force” to influence reviews on Amazon — and by the Force I mean its employees. Carbonite uses Rush Limbaugh as a spokesperson, and you can’t get more controversial than Rush. However, Mozy has the “Mozy gal,” who has almost as high a following as Deltalina. This is a tough choice, and we’ll call Round One a draw.

Round Two: Setup and Installation

Carbonite cleans Mozy’s clock in software design. For reference, both Mozy and Carbonite require Tiger, but Carbonite is Intel only.

Both programs have assistants that automatically pick your critical data, as well as let you manually decide what to back up and how much bandwidth to use. Because these programs upload large amounts of data, the average system could take weeks to back up. Neither program will back up external media. Mozy claims it does, but if you detach it, it forgets the configuration. Carbonite flat-out refuses to back up externals. If you keep critical files, such as iTunes or iPhoto libraries, on something besides your main boot drive, neither product will back it up reliably.

Mozy is a background program that can easily be quit, reconfigured or uninstalled without asking for an Administrator password. Like the Death Star, one well-placed shot, or mouse click, renders this program useless. On the other hand, Carbonite runs as a daemon, requiring Administrator approval to change or quit. Mozy allows you to back up other users, but doesn’t always run when switching users.

Dare I say that Mozy operates like a clumsy blaster and Carbonite is the elegant light saber? The clear winner in this round is Carbonite. If you have more than one user account on your system, it’s time to go home, because Carbonite has won.

Round Three: Restoration

Carbonite takes a blow to the chin in this category. Both services offer a web-based restore program, not requiring installation of their software. Unfortunately, Carbonite does not handle Mac OS packages well, so I could not restore OmniOutliner and Keynote data files via its web site, since its software saw them as folders rather then files.

However, Carbonite restored those files properly after installing the client software. Unfortunately, after installing the client software for either product on the restoring computer, the services got confused and stopped backing up my old computer.

The process for restoring Mozy is a bit more complex. Mozy has you choose the files to restore, and emails you when they’re “ready.” The prep for a 6GB file took about an hour. Mozy also allows you to order a DVD of your files at a rather hefty price of 50 cents a gigabyte, plus a processing fee of $29.95 and a next-day shipping charge of $40.

Neither company wins this round: restoration isn’t easy or efficient. Both programs, go back into your corners and make this process easier for subscribers.

Round Four: Support

Neither company includes phone support, but Carbonite allows you to purchase it for $19.95 a year and Mozy provides it with their “Pro” package. I tested support via free online chat sessions. Of the multiple times I contacted support for both real and made-up problems, both companies failed to provide quality tech support folks that could understand the most basic of questions.

Emailing questions was equally frustrating. I consistently received conflicting and contradictory information. This is very scary when we’re talking about backups. Carbonite annoyed me more because their reps would reference instructions they were going to email me, trying to quickly close the chat. Neither company wins this round and both deserve an upper cut for lousy tech support.

Round Five: Security

Mozy, how could you let your guard down? Its software, when used properly, has all your critical and very personal data stored on its servers. When resetting your password, no security questions are asked. All you need is access to someone’s email and you can quickly and easily reset the Mozy password on an account. Email accounts can be hacked and if all you need is someone’s email password to get into any file on their computer, well, that’s a foul stench even Princess Leia can smell from across the galaxy.

Carbonite forces you to answer a series of personal questions before it’ll let you reset, and not the standard biographical info you can find on the web about anyone. The clear winner in this security round is Carbonite.

Round Six: Cost

Both Carbonite and Mozy have limited trial versions, but these tests were done with the full versions. Mozy offers a multitiered plan of 2GB of backup for home users for free. Unlimited backups for home users are $4.95 per month (though 20 percent off codes are easy to find). Business users of the Pro version pay $3.95 a month plus 50 cents per GB. Carbonite is simpler at $54.95 a year for everyone ($4.58 a month, for those without calculators). Carbonite is less expensive, but Mozy does offer the free version. We’ll score this round a draw.

The Winner

Overall, there’s no clear winner in this fight. If you have multiple users on your computer, Carbonite wins by default because it easily backups all accounts and prevents others from tampering. Additionally, if security is of high concern, then Carbonite is also the winner due to Mozy’s terrible security practices. However, if you have exclusive control of your email and don’t have multiple people using your Mac, then Mozy might be the better choice since it has the friendlier pricing plans. Who wins? I’ll leave that up to you to let me know in the comments, and/or with your wallet.

But wait, a new contender approaches the ring! New to the scene is Internet darling BackBlaze. The winner of the Mozy vs. Carbonite bout will go on to fight BackBlaze in a further review, coming soon. Make your predictions now.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?
• The Backup Barrier: Obstacles to Online Storage Strategies
• When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream