Comments on: Backup company Carbonite loses customer data http://www.gaj-it.com/8255/backup-company-carbonite-loses-customer-data/ Bringing you the latest gadget & tech news, how-to's, reviews and shopping deals. Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:50:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: vijay http://www.gaj-it.com/8255/backup-company-carbonite-loses-customer-data/comment-page-1/#comment-22457 vijay Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:12:00 +0000 http://www.gaj-it.com/?p=8255#comment-22457 Carbonite customers’ data loss is not Promise’s fault. For some more context on this case, see Promise's response in a letter sent to customers this week at http://www.promise.com/support/Announcements.asp. Carbonite customers’ data loss is not Promise’s fault. For some more context on this case, see Promise’s response in a letter sent to customers this week at http://www.promise.com/support/Announcements.asp.

]]> By: Online Backup http://www.gaj-it.com/8255/backup-company-carbonite-loses-customer-data/comment-page-1/#comment-22249 Online Backup Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:40:47 +0000 http://www.gaj-it.com/?p=8255#comment-22249 I don’t disagree that this noteworthy, but it is interesting to see so much coverage of this issue in the last few days. Carbonite had an issue impacting a minority of their customer base. From what I gather all the impacted customers were properly notified. I don’t believe there is any allegation of further data loss. Kudos to Mr. Friend for taking this head on in the blogosphere. I don’t disagree that this noteworthy, but it is interesting to see so much coverage of this issue in the last few days. Carbonite had an issue impacting a minority of their customer base. From what I gather all the impacted customers were properly notified. I don’t believe there is any allegation of further data loss. Kudos to Mr. Friend for taking this head on in the blogosphere.

]]> By: Gaj http://www.gaj-it.com/8255/backup-company-carbonite-loses-customer-data/comment-page-1/#comment-22162 Gaj Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:45:54 +0000 http://www.gaj-it.com/?p=8255#comment-22162 Hi Dave, Thank you very much for updating us, I'm sure the readers of the site will appreciate your openess. It does look like the problems have now been addressed. Cheers, Gaj Hi Dave,

Thank you very much for updating us, I’m sure the readers of the site will appreciate your openess.

It does look like the problems have now been addressed.

Cheers,
Gaj

]]> By: Dave Friend http://www.gaj-it.com/8255/backup-company-carbonite-loses-customer-data/comment-page-1/#comment-22152 Dave Friend Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:10:37 +0000 http://www.gaj-it.com/?p=8255#comment-22152 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. 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.

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