Carbonite became one of the most familiar voices on American talk radio by selling something most listeners had never thought to buy: backup. For a flat yearly price, its software copied everything on a home computer to servers in a data center. A dead hard drive or a stolen laptop no longer meant lost photos and tax returns. By the summer of 2011, broadband was everywhere and the cloud was a household word.

Ads for Non-Techies

David Friend and Jeff Flowers were serial founders from the Boston tech scene. They bet that ordinary people would pay a small subscription to never think about backup again. Most consumers had no backup at all. Carbonite made it automatic and unlimited. Then it spent heavily on radio and podcast ads to reach people who would never read a tech review. Later it added plans for small businesses, and those customers proved steadier.

From Living Rooms to Webroot

Carbonite priced its IPO at $10 a share in August 2011, in a jittery market. The stock traded unevenly for years as consumer growth slowed. So the company turned toward business customers and bought several rivals. The biggest name among them was Webroot, in 2019. Later that same year, OpenText agreed to buy Carbonite for about $1.42 billion and folded it into its enterprise software group.

Cover: Chest, Valdés family. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a family strongbox (backup).