Carbonite Unveils HomePlus and HomePremier

Carbonite, Inc. unveiled its suite of Home solutions. The suite brings more backup options for consumers with the introduction of the new HomePlus and HomePremier solutions.

The new offerings complement the company’s current Home solution, and incorporate additional features designed to meet customers’ needs.

"Carbonite is committed to providing backup solutions that enable our customers to easily back up what they want to protect. We’re happy to introduce these new service options to our Home and Home Office users so they can choose the backup plan that best meets their needs," said David Friend, Chairman and CEO of Carbonite. "With HomePlus and HomePremier, Carbonite is addressing our customers’ interest in backing up their external hard drives, and is also introducing an innovative hybrid backup option that provides an even-greater level of protection by combining our cloud-based data backup with a local ‘bare metal’ backup."

New features in the Home suite include:

• External hard drive backup: HomePlus and HomePremier plans include external hard drive backup, the feature most often requested by customers. Now, users can also add files and folders saved on an external drive to their online backup.
• Mirror Image: HomePlus and HomePremier users will have an extra layer of protection with a local copy of their computer’s hard drive. With Mirror Image, Carbonite users now have the ability to backup the OS and software programs to an external hard drive. By combining this bare metal backup with their cloud backup, a user will have the reliability of physically separate and redundant data backups. Now, if a user’s hard drive crashes, Mirror Image can be used to restore the entire disk (including the Windows operating system, all applications and settings) in just a few hours.
• Courier Recovery: The HomePremier plan also comes with the option to have a backup recovery drive shipped to a user. For users with large backups, the Courier Recovery option is a fast way to get files back should they need to recover all their data or do not have Internet connectivity to perform a standard recovery.

"Carbonite pioneered simple, secure online backup, and now we are making comprehensive full-system backup just as easy and accessible for our customers. With the new Mirror Image feature, our customers can now back up their data files to the cloud and have a bare metal backup on a local hard drive. 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," continued Friend. "Bare metal backup used to require advanced computer skills, but now our users only need to plug in an external hard drive and let Carbonite do the rest."

All Carbonite Home solutions offer consumers a solution to safeguard their valuable files – photos, music, email, documents – by automatically, securely, backing them up. Carbonite cloud backup saves time and money, provides extra protection for a user’s files, and makes getting those files back quick and easy. Plus, with remote access, users can get to their backed up files from any Web browser, or from a smartphone.

The new suite of Home solutions is available with annual pricing of $59 (Home), $99 (Home Plus) and $149 (Home Premier). Discounted multi-year subscriptions are also available.