Carbonite's new HomePlus and HomePremier services provide such features as file mirroring, folder restoring and full-system snapshots -- much like modern enterprise storage networks.
Carbonite, a relatively high-visibility
cloud storage provider due to its strategy of buying lots of television and
radio commercial time, has advanced way beyond offering simple file backup in
the cloud.
The
Boston-based company has introduced a new suite of cloud-based services that
add up to what might be considered a personal cloud service for consumers and
home-based businesses.
Carbonite's
new HomePlus and HomePremier services, which went live Nov. 1, provide such
features as file mirroring, folder restoring and full-system snapshots-much
like modern enterprise storage networks.
"We've
found through our own research that about 30 percent of all computer users do
not have any sort of data backup system, largely because it's just a
hassle," Carbonite Vice President of Marketing Tom Murray told
eWEEK. "Furthermore, the notion of
restoring their operating system and applications is even more daunting to
them. Most people don't know how to do it, and if they do, it's extremely
time-consuming and inconvenient.
"We've
worked hard to bring this mirroring functionality to the masses and make it
easy to use. We made it so that it only takes a few clicks to completely
restore a system from a snapshot."
Resembles an Enterprise Storage System
This
is revolutionary for the consumer and SMB markets; a lot of enterprise-grade
system-restore software packages can't do it that easily. Carbonite's
MirrorImage now enables "bare-metal"-type snapshots of a computer's
entire system to be taken every 24 hours and copied to a second hard drive or
to one in the cloud; this includes all the data files.
"This
creates a complete copy of everything on a user's PC, so if their hard drive
crashes or has to be reformatted, the PC can easily be restored to exactly the
way it was before," Murray said. "Bare-metal backup used to require
advanced computer skills, but now our users only need to plug in an external
hard drive and let the software do the rest."
The
restoral process is simple indeed.
eWEEK
viewed a demonstration of a PC restoral operation, which required only three or
four clicks to get the PC back up and running.
The
new Carbonite Home suite also includes External Hard Drive Backup, which
enables HomePlus and HomePremier users to add files and folders saved on an
external drive to their online backup, and Courier Recovery.
Finally,
the premium HomePremier plan comes with the option to have a backup recovery
drive shipped to a user, in case of a PC data-loss disaster. For users with
large backups, the Courier Recovery option could be the fastest way to get
files back should they need to recover all their data or do not have Internet
connectivity to perform a standard recovery, Murray said.
The
new suite of Carbonite Home solutions became available Nov. 1. Annual pricing
runs $59 (for Carbonite Home, the basic storage service), $99 for HomePlus and
$149 for HomePremier. Discounted multiyear subscriptions are also
available, Murray said.
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
