Got Backup? Turns out Cloud Storage Fails Sometimes-Carbonite
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I often write about the importance of backing up all your files. Why? Because it’s important duh! I am actually shocked at the number of people with websites that don’t even know you are supposed to back up the data let alone have a backup! The same goes for any of your personal data. Think of it as a safe with all your most valuable child hood possessions. If you don’t keep them safe they are but a memory. Why take chances?
That’s why I recommend that you have more than one backup solution. If a backup fails then you are just as out of luck as not having a backup. There is no one safe method and the key is redundancy, having many backups. You really can’t have too many. That’s why I recommend trying cloud storage as well because it’s convenient and for the most part safe. But accidents happen and when big companies lose a lot of data really bad things happen like in the case of backup company Carbonite where apparently they lost 7500 customers data. I really hope that wasn’t you and that wasn’t your only backup. It does seem crazy that they wouldn’t have some sort of backup backup and another backup of that but I guess not. From the looks of the updates they deny this happening but then someone says it did. Who knows what the truth is, the point is never rely on one system because you are doomed to failure. Having a backup decreases those odds but not by much especially if time can degrade the source.
Here is a story of a company out of business because of not having a backup. Imagine that.
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I would like to make sure that your readers understand two points with regard to Carbonite’s lawsuit against Promise Technologies:
1) This event happened over a year ago. We do not say this to minimize the matter. But we do want to point out that this has not happened in a long time and is not an ongoing problem.
2) The total number of Carbonite customers who were unable to retrieve their data was 54, not 7,500.
Here is what happened: The Promise servers that we were purchasing in 2006 and 2007 use RAID technology to spread data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don’t lose any data. The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as “firmware” in the storage servers. In this case, we believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs that caused the servers to crash. Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups and more than 99% of these were completely restored without incident. Statistically, about 2 out of every 1,000 consumer hard drives will crash every week, so 54 of these customers had their PCs crash before their re-started backups were complete. Since they weren’t completely backed up when their PCs crashed, these customers were unable to restore all of their files from Carbonite. Most of the 54 got some or most of their data back. We took full responsibility for what happened and I did my best to call each of these customers personally to apologize.
As a result of our problems with the Promise servers, we switched to a popular Dell server that uses RAID6 – an improved RAID that allows for the loss of 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously before you lose any data. This configuration is in theory 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive — the chances of 3 out of 15 drives failing at the same time are almost nil.
So far, Promise has refused to accept responsibility for their equipment’s failures, so now we are suing them to get our money back. The Dell RAID servers have been flawless and we’re extremely happy with them.
Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.