Carbonite - unlimited online PC backup for $5/month

Carbonite Online Backup is a (relatively) new offering that Dmitry just told me about.

I'm intrigued by Carbonite's business model. Any time someone offers a flat fee service they must be making a ton of assumptions about average use, and in this case I'm guessing they must be betting on the average PC user having less than 27GB of data

Using S3 as a pricing guideline, and if you spread the cost out over a whole year, AND you figure the average user might need to upload/download the data just twice over a year, then $5/month would allow storing, on average about 27 GB perpetually.

27GB storage per month:	27GB * $0.15/GB-month = $4.05/month
27 GB transferred twice in a year:	27GB * $0.20/GB-transfers * 2 transfers /12 months = $0.90/month
Total costs for Carbonite:	$4.05 + $0.90 = $4.95/month

Again, that’s 27 GB of data, not sure how many people have that much data, yet. The average user probably has more like 10-20 GB. Obviously Carbonite must have studied some statistics and must also have made much less wild-ass guesses than mine. I'd say they might be successful - their biggest challenge is most likely going to be to get enough volume to offset their investment in the system and overhead; cost of storage is NOT the issue.

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