Carbonite was originally focused on photo storage, but in May of 2006 changed paths. They now offer a very competitive internet based backup solution. For $50/year Carbonite will backup all the data on your computer as long as it’s connected to the internet. The service has no upload limits and Carbonite can surely handle all of your data with a datacenter that can hold 1.5 petabytes (1.5 Petabytes = 1,572,864 Gigabytes) of data.

In the last year nearly 100 million digital photos, documents, emails and other files that otherwise would have been lost forever, have been recovered using Carbonite.

Carbonite claims that “statistically, you have about a 1 in 12 chance of having your hard drive crash in any given year, about a 1 in 10 chance of having your laptop stolen, and about a 1 in 3 chance of serious data loss through your own errors.” Regularly backing up your hard drive is one thing that way too many people don’t do and Carbonite provides an easy solution.

In addition to being able to signup through their website, they offer a boxed product available at Staples, CompUSA, Amazon and other stores. Also, Carbonite signed an agreement with Microsoft to include a year of free online backup with Microsoft Money 2007 and is included as part of a software kit named OrganizeMY Electronic Filing Cabinet For Dummies. Carbonite recently launched both remote access features and a Mac client in March 2009.

Carbonite competes with Mozy, AllMyData, crashplan and others.