David Friend is the founder, President, and CEO of Carbonite, an computer backup service. He has been a successful technology entrepreneur for over 25 years, and has previously co-founded Sonexis, FaxNet, Pilot Software, Computer Pictures Corporation and ARP Instruments. He has been featured in USA Today, Tech Capital, The Boston Globe, Mass HiTech, Fortune, Forbes and Tom Peter’s best-selling management book, The Pursuit of Wow! David has been a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Yale University, and attended the Princeton University Graduate School of Engineering. Visit Carbonite here.

What advantage does your company have over computer backups using external hard drives or CDs, and does the company plan on offering simple file storage solutions seen in other services?

First about CDs and hard drives, these things have been around for many years so if they were going to solve the problem they probably would have done so by now. When was the last time you backed up your computer onto CDs or a hard drive? It’s a pain in the neck, it’s deferrable, and people just don’t get around to it. Backup should be like insurance – you pay a little money, but you never have to think about it. The only time you should have to think about your backup is when your computer dies. There are a couple of other issues with CDs and hard drives. First, of course, if your house burns down bye bye backups. So if you would REALLY miss the stuff on your computer, having the backup in the house is a bad idea. No business would do that. CD-RW disks are easy to damage and most people don’t realize that they degrade and are frequently unreadable after 4 or 5 years. External hard drives get stolen and they break down, just like PCs. I had one user send me an email recently to say that he had been backing up to his hard drive for a couple of years and when his PC finally crashed, he discovered that the hard drive backups hadn’t been working. He lost everything.

When you say “simple file storage solution” I assume you are talking about something that looks like a network drive – just an extra disk in the cloud that you can dump stuff off to. That’s archiving, not backup. Backup simply says whatever is on your PC is safely and automatically copied somewhere else. Archiving is something that we might offer in the future, but not right now. It’s a small market compared with backup.

How did the service and company get started, and what was the development process like?

My partner Jeff Flowers and I had just sold our previous company and we were sitting on his patio looking out at the ocean. Then his wife walked in and her car had been broken into and her laptop was stolen. She lost about 2 years of baby pictures that she had never backed up. Literally 3 days later my daughter called from college to say that her hard drive had just crashed and she lost a term paper that she had spent 6 weeks on. We sent the hard drive out to one of those labs, and they charged me $800 to try to recover the data, but no luck. We said “Why is nobody backing up their PCs?” We hired a market research firm and found that only 3% of consumer back up their PCs daily. Half don’t back up at all. Why? “Too expensive and too complicated.” We figured if we could make it cheap enough and simple enough everyone would do it. Seems to be working. The unlimited pricing model is key to our simplicity – nobody has any idea how much data they really have on their PCs which is why services that are denominated in GBs don’t sell very well.

What technologies went into building Carbonite, and why did you choose them?

We are patenting the way Carbonite integrates with Windows. If you look at the “How it works” flash videos on our web site, you’ll see that Carbonite doesn’t need a separate UI – we just put little colored dots on your windows files and folders – yellow means waiting to back up, green means already backed up. People don’t want to learn some new interface.

We picked a very strong encryption scheme called 1024 bit DES3 encryption – it’s about the toughest encryption around. We also came up with a cool scheme that lets Carbonite run all the time – not scheduled like other backups. So it works all the time whenever you’re connected to the Internet. The cool part is that Carbonite automatically goes to sleep when you’re using your PC for something else, so it never interferes with your speed or browsing. So that’s a new technology.

Then there is a lot of technology around the way data is stored that gets our costs lower than any of our competitors and unfortunately I can’t tell you much about that because it’s our secret sauce.