TechCrunch has just reported on just how precarious your data might be up in the cloud. It turns out that the company has possibly lost over 7,500 companies data over the weekend. Although from the article this was in dispute, Carbonite CEO David Friend said the following:
"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."
However, a customer added this:
"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."
The article then goes on to say that the failure was due to some servers that were sold to them by Promise Technology, and it was faulty firmware that was at the heart of it. Consequently, law suits are being filed, and Promise are in the firing line, as are Interactive Digital Systems who integrated and advised the install of the Promise kit.
The article seems to think Carbonite is not entirely to blame, as the engineers at Promise were unable to fix the faults. I think that if that was the case they should have been looking elsewhere before the worst happened. Backing up is something that is so often overlooked, and being able to trust this to an external company looks like a perfect solution. You just set and forget; but how sure are you that you can trust the company at the other end of the cable? Ritchie Fiddes, Sales Director of Data Backup Technology commented:
" As Online Backup has become the industry standard for protecting business data, more and more providers have entered the market place. Often it is only when a full restore of data is required that companies discover that cheaper solutions do not provide them with the RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) that meet their Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity needs. When selecting an Online Backup provider it is essential to test the backup and recovery times for all of your data to ensure that it can be restored in a timely fashion."
Certainly it is worth a bit of research. A quick Google could save you a lot of time and heart ache.
4 thoughts on “Backup company Carbonite loses customer data”
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.
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
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.
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.