Back in February, when we announced our pricing and licensing details, we promised a special beta conversion offer.  Hopefully if you’re a beta tester you already received the thank you email, which includes details on that special offer.

From now until April 30^th, beta customers in the U.S. can get their first year of OneCare for only $19.95.  We think this is a great deal, especially considering OneCare is licensed for up to three PCs (and certified).  But don’t just take our word for it – Paul Thurrott (http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/windows_live_onecare.asp ) just reviewed OneCare and gave it a 4 out 5, “highly recommended” rating. 

While we are excited about making OneCare available for official purchase, there have been some disappointed bloggers/commenters who live outside the US.  I know a number of you have asked when international versions will be available, and why those outside the US cannot take advantage of the special beta conversion offer right now.

First, let me say that we are hard at work on getting support for other locales, but right now, OneCare is only officially supported in the US. (As many of you have seen, it is technically possible to download the beta on a machine with English operating systems.) But this is not a matter of US bias – we have been mindful of “internationalizing” OneCare from the outset. But given the complexity of the product, the extent of the test matrix, and the time in which we are trying to get OneCare out, it was simply not possible to cover multiple regions in this first official release. As we have said in the past, our goal is to make OneCare available internationally within the next year.

Second, even if you are able to successfully download and install OneCare outside of the US, we cannot in good conscience sell the product to you if we do not yet officially support it. Therefore, for those in Canada, UK, Australia, etc. and for all you English speakers, we are truly sorry we cannot make it available for you immediately.  Believe me, we’d love to be able to offer it around the world right now, but it’s still going to take us some time. Please try and be patient, though you can feel free to continue pushing us on this issue. J)

If you’re a current beta user and would like to take advantage of the special offer pricing, it’s very straightforward.  Just open up the main OneCare window and look for the “Purchase now” button in the ’actions to take’ section.  Here’s a link that shows you exactly what to do to take advantage of the $19.95 offer.  

If you’re not currently a beta customer, you still have until April 30^th to make good on the offer.  Just go to http://onecare.live.com and follow the instructions.  Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and April 30^th is the last day the beta is available for download and the last opportunity to take advantage of the great offer, so get in on the deal before it’s too late. 

Finally, I cannot end this post without making reference to the discussion about backing up to network drives. On this topic, I believe Kev Needham gets the “post of the week” (or the bi-week, in this case, sorry but it’s been a busy time for me). Kev, you did a good job describing your setup, and the very plausible scenario of having a home network with multiple machines, all running OneCare of course, which you’d like to back up to one device. Let me say first that I agree with the concept; someone commented that we don’t care about anything other than external hard drives. That is not the case, we certainly want to make it as easy as possible to do backup whatever your environment. However, we are focused on the most common user scenarios first, and many more folks have CD/DVD or external hard drives than network devices.

I also must say that I don’t agree with Kev’s point – “you folks really shouldn't care where I back my files up to, be it a secondary drive installed in the same machine, removable media of any kind, or a network volume.” We absolutely care where you do your backup, since we want to optimize OneCare to help the most users get the best backup experience possible. The example here is backing up to USB “thumb” or “jump” drives. Many of these have 256MB or 512MB of memory. While it is true that a user could back up to 7 or 8 of these devices, we don’t think that’s a very repeatable or reliable process to ensure data integrity, so we encourage you to use media that can make backup work every time.

Now I know a number of you power users out there are going to comment in the next three hours that it should be your choice where you back up. That’s true, it should be your choice, and we are working diligently on making as many choices available to you as possible. But please remember, there are literally millions and millions of people that have never done a backup, that don’t have any system at all. We want to make sure we help those folks get into the backup groove, and in parallel, we’ll continue working on some of the other scenarios you – and others – rightly pointed out.

Thanks for the great dialogue,

Yoav