US data back-up service Carbonite has arrived in the UK with an eye firmly on snatching the market away from rival BT. The service, which backs up files stored on a PC to the internet, goes head to head with a similar service from BT which arrived earlier this month.

Calumet’s PCBackup protection is £30 a year versus BT’s £59.88 per year, and offers unlimited storage as opposed to its rival’s 20GB limit. Describing the service, David Friend, CEO of Carbonite says, “If you have a limit on how much data you can store, the user is forced to decide what he does or doesn’t want to back up and must negotiate a user interface that allows him to select a backup subset that is less than the backup size limit. Most users find this process too time consuming and give up since it’s just too much trouble. Almost half our users have more than 20 GB of data, so they wouldn’t be able to use BT’s service.”

Carbonite double-encrypts files before they leave the user’s PC, employing techniques similar to those used by banks, the military and e-commerce sites. The company found that most people do not back up their PCs regularly, with only 3% of machines being backed up daily.

Carbonite is available online at www.carbonite.com or through retailers such as Amazon.com or Download.com. A free trial is also available at the software provider's website.