How Carbonite saved me $59,590 in lost revenues
I thought some of our small business customers would appreciate a story like this.
I just wanted to share this story to hopefully help others avoid a tragic mistake that so many experience everyday. I am an independent business, doing video post-production work for clients on all sorts of projects, large and small. I had historically backed up my data locally, replicating my hard drives on 2 or 3 external backup drives. About 4 months ago, however, during lunch with one of my clients, he mentioned that he had signed up with a new backup service called Carbonite. He liked the convenience of the service since he could simply let his backups run to a remote site and not have to worry about maintaining anything.
I was skeptical at first, since I didn’t like the idea of sending my critical information anywhere offsite. But my client raised a good point – a lot of Fortune 1000 companies are doing just this – using services such as Salesforce.com – outsourcing IT infrastructure is just the new way of doing things. If you want to compete, I remember him saying, you’ll need to focus on your core business and not have to worry about hot-swapping drives and power redundancy, etc.
Well, I decided to sign up for a trial of Carbonite, and after discovering that the service only costs around 5 bucks a month, wondered why I had spent all that time and money worrying about hard drives. Still, I thought the service had to be complex and would go down on me at some point, as do most online services (right when you need them). To my surprise, however, Carbonite was very easy to setup – it’s a lightweight application that installs on your computer in seconds, and then after a brief setup process where you tell the app which folders and files you want to backup, it does the rest for you. Much easier than configuring windows and various utility apps to replicate folders locally!
Anyways – the critical part of the story came months after setting Carbonite up. I live in the Los Angeles area, which is not exactly known for it’s tropical thunderstorms, but we had a bad storm one winter. I remember watching the TV and then suddenly everything went dead. Not a common occurrence, but I figured that it was just a routine power outage.
I few minutes later the power came back on and after checking on a few things in my apartment I wandered into my home office to do some work. I tried to boot up my computer, and nothing, It was dead. I tried everything and realized that both my computers were fried. So much for my power surge protectors, I later found out that mine was only rated up to 30 volts! So I lost 2 computers and all the data on those.
The crazy part was that I was just finishing up a huge animation project that was a 4 month contract with a major studio. I had gigabytes of files across all my drives that were lost. I took out my laptop and logged into Carbonite, crossing my fingers that the data was still there! To my relief, once I logged in, I found that all my data was there and ready to be downloaded.
Had I somehow lost all that data, I would have defaulted on a $50K+ contract, not to mention the ramifications on my business overall from losing out on a successful outcome with a marquee client. I can tell you that the experience was heart-wrenching, but the relief I felt from seeing all my data there safe in a remote data center somewhere just convinced me that backing up your data is just a good insurance policy that’s worth much more than the $7 a month it costs!
Hopefully my story will help others avoid a terrible outcome when disaster strikes – you just never know when something crazy and unexpected can happen!
