wake up tomorrow and your hard drive is dead

Dueling data backup firms are rare bright spot - The Boston Globe

"We found that the only thing that sells our product is fear," says Carbonite chief executive David Friend. "The fact that you might wake up tomorrow and your hard drive is dead and all your photos are gone."

Mozy and Carbonite are two of the leaders of the online backup business, a rare bright spot in a gloomy tech economy. Rather than buying their own hard drives to save a copy of their data, consumers and small businesses pay a fee (Mozy's is $59 a year, Carbonite's is $50) to send their information securely over the Net, and have Mozy or Carbonite keep a copy that can be retrieved any time. IDC, a Framingham research firm, predicts that online backup services will generate about $715 million in annual revenue by 2011.