Carbonite Adds Combined Bare Metal, Cloud Backup to Stable

Cloud storage platform provider and Talkin’ Cloud Stock Index member Carbonite is extending its offering with the addition of bare metal external hard drive backups that can be shunted up to the cloud.

The new backup plan comes with two additional tiers on top of its flagship Carbonite Home offering: HomePlus and HomePremier. Both new tiers offer customers the ability to back up files and folders from an external hard drive to the cloud, as well as the ability to clone their local hard drive (including OS and applications) to an external disk and the cloud simultaneously for later recovery.

That so-called “Mirror Image” functionality is designed to help customers get up and running again quickly even in the event of physical drive failure or loss. But what HomePremier users get exclusively is courier recovery — Carbonite will literally ship you an external hard drive cloned from your backup, which can potentially be a huge time savings for users with tons of data.

Carbonite HomePlus is priced at $99 per year, while Carbonite HomePremier costs $159 annually. And, of course, the standard-issue Carbonite Home is $59 per year.

Is this announcement consumer-focused? Absolutely. But Carbonite does have an SMB-focused reseller program, and as was pointed out at the Asigra Partner Conference this last summer, there’s no reason why cloud service providers can’t get in on the increasingly lucrative consumer cloud storage market.