[Swami Kumaresan]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

Hmm. Interesting. In my talks with Carbonite, that never came up. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but it seems to be focused more on the monthly usage of bandwidth. As in, your first month your account usage will be high. In month three, if you were to suddenly add another 100 GB worth of data, that would cause a red flag on Carbonite's end and they'd talk to you. That doesn't seem to unusual to me, and I'd think that if there's a legitimate reason for the customer adding that extra 100 GB of data, Carbonite wouldn't cancel the account. It's an interesting point though and I'm going to ask someone from Carbonite to step into the thread and clarify what that policy means.

All I know is that I have about 70 GB total uploaded, and I'm very happy about it. :mrgreen:

(You realize though that 99% of Carbonite's customers are not going to have 100 GB of data to back up though, right? They'll lose money on someone like me, but make money on someone like my in-laws who only have about 3 GB worth of data to back up. That's how companies like this make money, it all averages out.)

I work for Carbonite and Jason is generally correct. Frankly, we don't really want his 70GB :wink: but we're happy he told his in-laws about us. At this point our average user has about 5GB of data. Carbonite is perfect for the home user, student, road warrior etc. who has about 1-15GB of data they need to back up. Does that mean we'll cancel Jason's account? Of course not. We'll lose money on a few people, make money on the rest.

Every now and then we get someone who tries to send us 300GB or something - they usually quit when they realize their cable modem is going to take 9 months to complete their first backup! We probably wouldn't keep an account like that around today at $5/mo. In the future, since storage and comms cost are dropping so rapidly, larger users will become more profitable. So in a year, when Jason's account is 120GB, our costs would have fallen to compensate. (If you just did the math on 70, 120, 1 year etc...I made those up


So why do we say unlimited storage? Is it a trick? No, it really isn't. Why would we say unlimited only to cancel accounts right after someone signs up. THE REASON we say unlimited is that the average PC user (none of you is probably in this group) doesn't really know what 1GB is. That's why Apple markets the iPod saying "stores 10,000 songs". We want to keep Carbonite as simple as possible. Simplicity and price are our advantage. If a user has to worry about tiered pricing etc. it just adds complication which turns most people off.