TechCrunch.com – Carbonite Loses Customer Data
According to this article, Carbonite lost 7,500 customers’ data. Losing customer data is not a fun spot to be in and I seriously feel for the folks at Carbonite, especially since it was a hardware failure and not related to Carbonite software.
Note – CEO of Carbonite, David Friend points out in a comment below that only 54 customers actually lost data that was unrecoverable.
Before I begin, please be aware of the following -
- I am a partner in a company that makes the backup software CrashPlan
- Carbonite is a competitor to the CrashPlan consumer backup product
- I am going to tout a feature about CrashPlan that prevents this from affecting CrashPlan users
This brings me to the point of this article and a point we’ve been trying to make with CrashPlan since its inception -
Online backup by itself is not enough
Online backup solutions are for the most part very simple to use and get going with. However many of them lack a crucial component to a complete backup solution – multiple backup locations. The premise is that because the solution is online and in the cloud, it is reliable and safe. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Cloud reliability relies on a number variables -
- Network connectivity – You have to be online to talk to the cloud! In other words, if you are not online, you are not backed up.
- Bandwidth – Bandwidth is the killer for transferring data too and from the cloud. Backup data is often measured in GB if not TB these days. At 10 Mb/s, you are looking at 10 days to download a 1 TB of data.
- Hardware – Ultimately your data is going to be on some storage system, somewhere. Believe it or not, its most likely sitting on the same type of storage that is in your computer – a SATA drive of some sort. Various RAID setups can help make failure of this drive less drastic but the bottom line is that all drives fail at some point.
As of today, online/cloud solutions are facing some serious practical challenges. Will these challenges be overcome in the future? Possibly, but to be safe, one should treat online backup as just a part of a complete backup solution.
You need multiple backup locations
- Your backup is only as good as your backup location.
- Your best bet is to have at least three.
A complete backup solution should provide you a guaranteed restore experience and to have that, you need at least three (3) backup locations -
- Local backup – This hits the 80% sweet spot for your daily backup and restore needs. An external USB drive works beautifully in this capacity as it provides a fast, easy to use backup location.
- Near-line backup – In CrashPlan we call this backing up to your friends and family. Don’t just backup to a cloud, backup to a trusted location that you can access physically and quickly should disaster strike. If that USB drive fails after someone stole your laptop, you can still drive over to a friend’s house and get your data.
- Online backup – Yes, online backup is an important part of the overall solution. In a pinch, you can quickly restore key files, like a term paper or a sales presentation. However, it is less than ideal should you need to restore an entire filesystem.
<start-sales-pitch>
CrashPlan makes backing up to mutiple locations simple. Backup to local drives, your friends computers and/or our online backup service, CrashPlan Central. All of this done in a super efficient, secured manner.
If this sounds like a backup solution for you then try CrashPlan for yourself, its free!
</end-sales-pitch>
2009:03:24 at 08:58 |
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 two years 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, two years ago 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.
2009:03:27 at 12:58 |
I’d choose a more reliable backup source (more than one) like http://www.mozy.com or http://www.myotherdrive.com and backup my data to both spots. That way you’re guaranteed to be able to recover your data.