Releases

posted on 07 February 2008 15:30

Boston, MA — February 6, 2008 — Carbonite, Inc., the leading provider of online backup services to consumers and small businesses, today announced the release of Carbonite Release 3.5, a major upgrade to its Carbonite Online PCBackup™ service. The new version provides several valuable new options for users, including a file migration wizard, file versioning, backup scheduling, and incremental backup. Release 3.5 also includes advanced file type selection and a private encryption key.

"Carbonite is still the simplest backup service on the market," Carbonite CEO David Friend said. "But if you're an advanced user and want to be able to schedule your backups, retrieve previous versions of documents, etc., then this major new release will be good news."

A key feature of Carbonite Release 3.5 is the wizard that helps users to migrate files saved on an older computer onto a new system. The wizard makes the uploading of files onto a new machine simple, handling even complex restores such as uploading files from a Windows XP file structure onto a PC operating Windows Vista.

"A lot of computer users who experience a crash with an XP machine are buying a new one with a Vista operating system," Friend said. "Because the file structures are different with Vista and XP, it can be difficult to restore previous files onto a new Vista system. Our wizard makes this process easy for the user so they can have their valuable files accessible on their new operating system."

With the new file versioning feature in Carbonite Release 3.5, Carbonite will automatically store multiple versions of files going back at least 90 days. If a file is accidentally overwritten, the user will be able to go back and restore previous versions.

Carbonite Release 3.5 also includes backup scheduling options. Users can schedule backups to occur at specific times by day of week, or they can create blackout periods during which Carbonite's normal continuous backups will be suspended.

Block level incremental backup has also been included in Release 3.5, improving the speed of updating files as they change. With incremental backup, a single updated cell in an Excel spreadsheet will be backed up on its own, instead of re-sending the entire document. Also, if a user shuts down their PC in the middle of backing up a very large file, Carbonite will resume where it left off when the computer is turned back on. It will not have to start over at the beginning of the file.

Carbonite users will also have more options when selecting files to be backed up in Carbonite. Not only can the user back up specific folders, but also file types within individual folders. To support this new feature, Carbonite's familiar dot system indicating a file's backup status has been updated to include a green doughnut (a green dot with a hole in the middle). This new label indicates all files selected for backup within a folder are backed up, but that some files within the folder have not been selected for backup.

With this release, Carbonite also allows users to keep their own encryption keys, a practice required by certain legal and healthcare users.