The danger of storing your data in the cloud, part n. VC-backed online backup and storage provider Carbonite has lost data of 7,500+ customers who relied on the company to keep their files safe, The Boston Globe unveiled over the weekend.
(note: see updates below, at this point we can’t be sure anymore if any data was actually lost or not)
The newspaper gets the information from a lawsuit that was filed by the Boston company last week, alleging that two of its service providers sold it over $3 million worth of defective hardware, linking this to the loss of their customer’s data and as a result, bringing “substantial damage” to its business and reputation.
Carbonite is seeking unspecified damages against Promise Technology, which it is suing for unfair and deceptive business practices, fraud and breach of contract, as well as system integrator and IT consultancy firm Interactive Digital Systems (for breach of warranty). The latter company advised and implemented Promise Technology solutions, which were supposed to monitor multiple computer hard drives in order to assure that they were functioning properly.
I think it would be too easy to point to Carbonite for the loss of data if in fact there were serious errors with the software that were unable to be fixed by Promise engineers – something an executive at Promise Technology categorically denies – but the real victims of course are the customers, who will most likely think twice before trusting a cloud-based storage and backup provider with their files from this point forward. I also think it’s worth pointing out Carbonite has been caught red-handed earlier this year astroturfing Amazon reviews, as reported by David Pogue of The New York Times.
Update: Carbonite CEO David Friend weighs in:
“The failures of the Promise equipment occurred primarily during 2007. We stopped buying the Promise servers and switched suppliers. We allege that the Promise servers had defective firmware and were not reliable enough for Carbonite’s use. We are demanding that Promise compensate us for the cost of replacing their defective products. As for the 7,500 affected customers, their backups were restarted automatically and immediately on our new servers.”
Update 2: Friend checked in again to state that no data was lost in the event, but a commentor says otherwise (anyone else affected who would like to weigh in?):
“I actually am one of those customers and I truly lost data (I had a hard drive lock up right when this happened). It was backing up my personal home PC and I lost over a year’s worth of pictures. The CEO called me personally, and they gave me free service for awhile, but I definitely have multiple layers of backup now.”
This isn’t the first data loss horror story we’ve covered here, and it won’t be the last either.
On a sidenote, I’d change my homepage a bit for a while until things cool down if I were Carbonite.
(Via Cloud Computing Journal, hat tip to Marco Trombetti)
Online storage is by no means the best way to prove your worth.
Unless it is distributed e.g. torrent
Is it so hard to stop by Staples and by a 1TB external hard drive and a couple of 15 GB thumbs??
Last time I purchased them I paid $199 for 1 TB (Maxtor) that has encryption and auto back up with other settings as well, and a Sony 8gb thumb for $29
Am I plugging Staples, well yea in way I am. At least the store I purchase from…lol!
How can you really trust ANYONE but yourself with ANY of your information?
“Cheers”
JP
What happens when you get burgled?
We got burgled last week and they took all my local backups. Fortunately I had it all backed up on S3 (and elsewhere too) which saved the day. Not having an offsite backup is a recipe for disaster.
Get 2 external drives, one at home, one at the office. Have both of them to sync with your laptop drive every time you connect at home, and every time you connect at the office.
That makes 3 copies of the data in at least 2 different places, chances to lose data are slim.
That doesn’t work if:
1) You home is your office
2) You don’t work with a laptop you can bring back home.
Pierre
Did you just say “burgled”?
Spoken like true tech nerds who forget that for a lot of people the whole act of backing up is incredibly complex… Mozy is the easiest I have ever used and it is still beyond my mother or sister to use.
Reason why you don’t trust to store your data to a startup’s storage?
I use Egnyte. Great company!
They didn’t even have a proper backup? Feels sorry for those who have lost valuable data…
Yeah I agree, it really stinks when you use data. I backup things to 27 places to try and avoid this
WOW Tedeks! Ever hear of an external hard drive and a safe deposit box?
Yeah until that drive dies and then you’re in big trouble. I’ve gone through so many external HDs I try to be careful.
@Niyati, Read the article. The company said that the loss happened in 2007 and that users files were immediately onlined from backup onto other servers.
Folks READ before commenting. It makes the discussion so much better.
Wake up and Smell the Coffee… Oh and READ…
@FireBrand: Follow your own advice. The article did not say the backups were recovered. It said that the “backups were restarted”. Previous backups were completely lost; the affected users were automatically started at ground zero, starting new full backups of their current system state to new servers as if they were brand new users.
Maybe a little stronger coffee would be in order.
“The danger of storing your data in the cloud”
What you should have wrote was:
“The danger of storing your data in the cloud that’s not Amazon.”
Why pigeonhole the real company thats does cloud right for a company that tried to compete against them and failed?
Agree 100 percent. Amazon == the cloud.
Amazon have built a rock solid architecture/product with S3 – we use them for all of our storage and touching every bit of wood around me – we have not lost any data!
I agree that people see Amazon as a reputable and large company – so if its good enough for them its good enough for me mentality works!
Long may it last!
Yeah and I think you can put a certain level of trust in Amazon. That is the biggest issue with online backup, do you trust that the company will be around for years to come. I’m about to start using S3, I hope it works out. Going to start backing up our site at Skedet with s3.
S3 is a VERY expensive form of backup and is a poor use of their technology. I still think the whole cloud thing is very over pushed and over rated. But make up your own minds.
You all still did not read the article. You read the headline. In the article it states that the losses were in 2007 and no data was lost for the users, just hardware failures that the companies who sold them the hardware are being sued for.
Usually this site gets things right, but the headline is wrong. The real headline is “Cloud vendor Carbonite sues Hardware vendors for selling them vaulty hardware.” No where in what the company stated did they say that they permanently lost anyones data. The whole source article is about the law suit.
Wake up and Smell the Coffee…
You are reading this article late my friend, they have changed it since earlier when they announced the company was “Deadpooled” which I see now this statement is not here anymore.
This article never carried any reference to Carbonite hitting the deadpool. The only edits you see are updates.
Has nothing to do with the fact that their data is not on Amazon.com S3 or other cloud service.
With proper redundancy this can be avoided.
D
Uh, stop spreading the coolaide, because they have lost data. Amazon is no serious win.
Did any customers lose any data that was not a dupicate of what they already had on there own computer(s)
No excuse. Carbonite need to accept the blame regardless of who actually caused the problem. It was their decision to use whatever suppliers they chose. I fail to see how they can recover customer confidence after a fiasco such as this.
I agree completely. When you build something aiming for high reliability, you don’t just trust that systems work; you continually test the full loop. For backup systems, that means ongoing random restores and bit-for-bit verification against originals. Anything less is just hoping that it works.
In my view, the people at Promise could indeed have been deceptive. Regardless, the Carbonite engineers and manages were negligent here.
This is the scary thing with putting your data with a company you’ve never heard of. I guess for that matter, putting your data with anyone is a scary thing. Has anyone used amazon s3 with success? I still feel like a drobo or hp media start server is the way to go. Backup is a tough thing.
I believe data stores in S3 auto-replicates across multiple data centers so theoretically you should not encounter a data loss like this one – unless all of amazons data centers get nuked.
I believe data stores in S3 auto-replicates across multiple data centers so theoretically you should not encounter a data loss like this one – unless all of amazons data centers get nuked.
Yeah, I’d expect a certain level of high availability from S3. I think we are going to start using them to backup Skedet. Just want to make sure it is a reliable source. The price definitely isn’t bad, so it makes it attractive.
Speaking of redundancies…
“Has anyone used amazon s3 with success?”
Get of the “babe lost in the woods” routine here,
It’s 2009 not 2005, what kind of question is this?
Anyone who reads TechCrunch should know that Amazon is the start-up standard and S3 is the king of online storage.
And Robin, again, when you say “data in the cloud” the first thing people think of when you say “cloud” IS Amazon!
Call it like it is, some company decided to sub lease some servers and get slick with venture funding, they never owned their own servers.
Don’t place Amazon, Google and Microsoft real Cloud efforts into this pool of companies from Dumbfukinstan.
The issue isn’t who the company is but how it does business. I work with a local IT company and we offer various kinds and flavors of backup, typically 3X redundant (live volume, local sync volume, local removable backup volume, offsite RAID). We do this all ourselves with system(s) we built. We started offering backup/recovery because of things like this. I recently moved a customer from a Big Brand Name Backup vendor. Said vendor had not run numerous backups. Said vendor charged ransom to provide the data when the customer quit. Said vendor basically refused to play nice with anyone, even when paid. Carbonite is not expensive but is obviously better at marketing than they they are at solution design (or accepting responsibility for their own mistakes).
Itz haz failz !!!!!!!!!
Perhaps the story sounds scarier than it is. Even if 7,500 accounts were affected – how many were trying to restore data (iow – a true loss)?
Granted – no excuse for this but there’s not such thing as a “no brainer” – and off-site backups will have their share of problems.
Kudos to Carbonite for having the guts to go after a company they felt sold something defective.
I gotta disagree. This company provides exactly one service. And they failed. The fact is, many small companies are using experimental and/or not fully baked products to run their services. Media Temple’s recent 48 hour GS outage is another example. But it looks like they had a great party at SXSW.
You probably shouldn’t comment ever again.
Just been on to the Carbonite live chat about this. Apparently according to the agent I was talking to: ‘David Friend, Carbonite’s CEO said, “The failures of the Promise equipment occurred primarily during 2007″‘
So it would seem this is some time ago. I have also been assured that the company no longer uses any Promise equipment. Still, I don’t think I’ll be renewing my subscription.
What exactly does “primarily” mean in that statement? Does it mean it “mostly” occurred in 2007, but also did in 2008 and 2009?
My heart goes out to those who lost their data – not a good or fun event at any time. I think the most important aspect here is that you should never have only one backup procedure or method. I have had a backup 1 TB Drive fail – and immediately put at least 2 methods to backup drives. As drives get larger, and data becomes more fragile, making sure you have at least 2 methods and making sure every so often they actually work is a best practice for any company/person who relies on their data.
It will be interesting to see the effect roll-out to other “cloud” back-up companies that have been shooting up recently. Maybe this is a good time for them to “beef-up” what they offer and make sure they are not using the same suppliers themselves.
Read the article. NO ONE LOST DATA…
Ok I don’t work for or own anything in Carbonite. But folks, read the freaking article before pouring out your heart for something that didn’t happen.
Company states, and so far NO ONE has come forward to say otherwise. No data was lost.
Wake up and Smell the Coffee…
You keep saying this Firebrand but it isn’t true. The data was lost and people had to redo their backups from scratch.
and people did completely lose their data when their home data was lost carbonite did not have a backup.
….Carbonite CEO David Friend weighs in:
“…As for the 7,500 affected customers, their backups were restarted automatically and immediately on our new servers.”
that means the backups had to start again.
“I actually am one of those customers and I truly lost data (I had a hard drive lock up right when this happened). It was backing up my personal home PC and I lost over a year’s worth of pictures. The CEO called me personally, and they gave me free service for awhile…”
And I prefer Tea not coffee
7500 customers losing their data at a single cloud service: oh no, the cloud is evil!
7500 customers losing their data in individual hard-drive crashes: business as usual
The cloud’s engineers are, for the most part, still smarter than the average user, and no matter what, I trust the guys with CS degrees on hardware designed to be used in mission-critical applications who’ve been doing this their whole life a heck of a lot more than my dad and a Dell from BestBuy.
LOL I don’t trust anyone with a CS degree, the majority are hacks.
A ‘cloudburst’.
‘The Cloud Has Spoken’
As a Carbonite customer what concerns me more than the data loss is the lack of transparency. Carbonite should have informed customers – they didn’t. There is nothing on their site either. Problems can happen but its how a company deals with the issues that is most important. I will continue using the service until my subscription period runs out, but I will no longer be relying on it and I sure won’t be renewing.
Carbonite – you blew it. Not because data was lost but because you couldn’t be bothered to tell us.
If not data was lost… What was there to inform you about? Other than the fact that equipment failed? That happens ALL the time in a data center. If you think otherwise then you had better just stick to using your own devices for backup.
Carbonite blew nothing, other than they should have done a better job of controlling the message of the first article. Shame on them for not being very clear that NO data was lost and that this happened back in 2007. I doubt anyone even noticed that it occurred.
Unlike oh say Google. Now there is a company that you can complain about. And they are SELLING cloud services.. Go figure. Nothing here about that.
Wake up and Smell the Coffee…
Always Expect the unexpected…
Yeah, but if you are trusting someone with your data, I think you’re making an assumption it will be around when you need it. I guess the lesson is to backup in multiple places.
Here we go again – underfunded, unrated, and mostly uninsured services providers and clients in the cloud.
Many VC funded web / cloud providers are un-rateable and un insurable, not just due to lack of liquidity, but due to the lack of any stadnards regarding industry standard.
I hope that some here will read my post on underwriting cloud services hosting and business continuity, part one is done, the other will be done today.
I dont have all the answers, but I did study the issues in the sector, and it is a mess.
Underfunded?
$26 million is an awful lot of funding …
awful lot != adequate. Especially since they have done at least one restart.
Yes, 26 million may be considered a paltry sum when you are shepherding the data of an unsuspecting userbase that may or may not have mission critical uses for their data. Whether or not a company is in actuality underfunded can only be determined by their capital liquidity and profitability in a 48 month term – i.e., will they, can they, should they survive?
26M???? That’s one moderate IT dept in an SME biz.
What’s the issue? The backups have been lost – the originals are still intact on the users PC’s/Networks. We get tapes fail now and again, its only a risk while the original is getting a fresh backup done. Presumably the customer service part of Carbonite are in touch with all customers telling them to do a local backup …
i guess on the internet, nothing is yours.
Oh man, talk about egg on your face.
No, it’s shit hitting the fan.
There’s always a risk of losing data online as hardware is bound to fail anytime and anywhere. But web and backup are totally two different terms which can be dangerous when combined.
Who the hell uses Promise technology in any type of critical applications anyhow. Clearly going cheap got them what they deserved.
The “cloud” word yet again? The word “internet” is out of style I guess?
The internet was so 2001.
This is so sad ,other may learn lessons from this ,storing your data on cloud not so safe this proven.
I hate to hear this for the customers, however all clouds (or Online Backup companies) aren’t created equally so they shouldn’t be judged equally.
Amazon s3 is a great service. We are an Online Backup company that charges much more than Carbonite. You get what you pay for?
Backup company needs backup? look like that. What if any of the customers immediately needed their backup after the loss?
I actually am one of those customers and I truly lost data (I had a hard drive lock up right when this happened). It was backing up my personal home PC and I lost over a year’s worth of pictures. The CEO called me personally, and they gave me free service for awhile, but I definitely have multiple layers of backup now.
Yup, I think you definitely need to backup to multiple places to be safe. At least they are trying to help you out, however a year of service after you lost data is hard.
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Anyone who uses cloud-based services and expects security and 100% stability and availability is a complete moron and absolutely, 100% deserves to lose everything.
I wouldn’t trust ANY company or service with my backups, free or paid. Hard drive and DVD backups combo is the only way to go.
Just don’t rely on 1 Hard Drive as they crash all the time
. I guess backing up to DVD and Hard Drive is a pretty good move. Also backing up to Drobo or HP Media Smart with RAID can solve the HD problem.
Just don’t rely on 1 Hard Drive as they crash all the time
. I guess backing up to DVD and Hard Drive is a pretty good move. Also backing up to Drobo or HP Media Smart with RAID can solve the HD problem.
That’s why I use Jungle Disk with my own S3 account for my online backup…. most of these small startup operations seem very unreliable.
The story was planted in the Boston Globe by EMC, which recently bought Mozy. (EMC is a MA company and big Globe advertiser.)
EMC just wrecked one of their largest competitors with a year old story.
The facts may be old, but the lawsuit was filed last week, uncovering an event that to the best of my knowledge had not been made public to date. That makes this news.
And what’s with all the innuendo about EMC? You can’t back that up with factual information, can you?
Carbonite has raised nearly 50 Million, not 26 Million as the company profile says, above.
“The story was planted in the Boston Globe by EMC”
Maybe I’m missing something here, but Carbonite sorta announced this to the world by filing the lawsuit.
Carbonite hired at last 2-3 different companies (consultants?) to handle their core business needs?
If you are a company who’s entire business model hinges on taking care of clients data, why would you not have in-house staff for this?
it’s worth pointing out that hard drives, such as the kind you at retail, fail at a rate of 3% or more per year. RAID servers are thousands if not millions of times more reliable than an external hard drive. So those of you who think that backing up to an online service is not as safe as an external hard drive need to look at the failure rates.
I hate to hear of situations like this, I can’t imagine losing a year’s worth of data. This wouldn’t happen if people understood that not everything should be backed up online. Have a combination of local AND online storage. It’s so easy and makes sense. Companies like Memeo and maybe a few others make it so easy to do, that’s what I use.
Unlike Carbonite or Mozy, CrashPlan offers on-site, off-site and online (cloud) storage. Bottom line: If you care about your data, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
In regards to their hardware failure, I’m surprised they rely on hardware to be working. Our solution assumes hardware failure and tests all data at rest proactively.
IMHO it’s better a better design to assume your hardware isn’t working, and build software that detects and corrects.
So check out CrashPlan – it’s free for personal use. Backup on-site and off-site. Build your own storage cloud.
Great reminder that it’s important to have a backup of your backup.
SafeCopyBackup.com is great insurance to add to your local backup plan. It’s totally different from Mozy and Carbonite because you can purchase a single account and put ALL your computers on it. If you have more than one computer (Windows or Mac) it makes great sense.
Is wuala kind of p2p backup solution better?
Yes, it’s much better, but depends on anonymous storage. I’m the CEO of Cucku and our produce provides p2p (social) backup between friends and family members. Cucku provides full local backup (ideally to an external hard drive) and offsite backup in one package. There is no single point of failure. I blogged about the risks of trusting an online backup provider with a single datacenter a week before this story broke… the lesson really is that you need backups in more than one location.
http://www.will....com/backup.htm, see on the middle of the (free) list to see paid competitors of carbonite
In light of this fiasco, this dimwit might want to wipe the s**t-eating grin off his face.
http://www.carb...A_Rush_1_Banner
nice one…
rush limbaugh? go figure.
Wow, I wouldn’t think that would happen to a company like that. Time to get a new backup company. I use Global Data Vault.
Seriously Techcrunch? this happened in 2007 when they were still a young company with startup detours surely in their future. I’ve got a news flash for you guys! you here of this thing called twitter??
hmm….http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/mozy-mac-out-of-beta-50-free-accounts-available/
was this a partnership deal with Mozy?…fishy if you ask me.
Should have been using Mozy!
It’s widely known that Promise Technology, Inc. makes some of the most lousy RAID hardware on the planet. Using their products in the storage infrastructure of a commercial service is just pure negligence. Anybody operating a service like this is negligent if they don’t test that the failure conditions encountered can be actually met and resolved by RAID products like these. Sorry suing them won’t help — it’s totally your fault!
This article was poorly written. You made it sound like data was lost right now. Headline is misleading and should have been fixed. When I first looked at the headline I thought my backup at Carbonite was gone.
I think TC owes an apology to the company. I am with a start up too and press acting like this sucks.
I am glad I’m not the only one who thinks they’re insane for using Promise RAID’s and expecting the reliability of EMC or even Dell…
C’mon people, thats just dumb.
Shit happens.
IT hosting companies are pain-in-the-ass most of the time.
Once, when we migrated to another IT company, some idiot “Greg” accidentally wiped out our whole system – two years of work gone in 4 minutes. We had backup – snapshot of whole system, and restored the system back, but the stress and the wondering…
all I can say : “Gambate!” – Keep going!
Ever heard of Iron Mountain Digital?
Now while many will say that their Connected PC Backup service is not priced for consumers, it is business-grade and trusted by some of the Worlds most admired brands and besides – as someone else mentioned earlier in the thread – you get what you pay for.
We just launched the service here in South Africa – powered by Iron Mountain, and it works well!
http://www.backupsa.co.za
We’ve been providing Iron Mountain Digital solutions in Ireland for the past two years. Our customers love it as does out IT engineers as 1: its highly reliable and 2: its easy to manage thousands of devices and servers under the one screen.
Good luck with your new service in South Africa.
LOL! The home page…
That’s why I use http://www.myotherdrive.com for my online backup. I’ve been with them since early 2005 and have had no issues with them losing any of my data.
I have worked in the backup industry for several decades and if there’s one disturbing trend I’ve noticed it is that when a novice user makes a backup, he may think it’s OK to ‘free up disk space’ by deleting the original files, leaving him with no real ‘backup’. When I worked at HP, I helped design a home storage product that incorporated RAID and when home users put their data on it, they were even more inclined to feel that because their data was on two separate drives, it constituted its own backup (but it doesn’t).
When it comes to backup, you need to have the important stuff (like digital photos) stored at least 3 ways:
- locally on a hard drive
- on removable media (preferably off site)
- if you don’t mind perpetual payments, in the cloud
At least one of the backups should be automated, occurring without need for manual intervention.