Slashdot Mirror
Hotmail Loses Customer Files
Rick Zeman writes "News.com is reporting that Microsoft's Hotmail service has lost customers' files 'due to 'system events.' The particular user cited, of course, has no recourse because of the broad disclaimers companies such as Microsoft hide behind; however, you are getting what you pay for. The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
I lost all those megabytes of increase my penis size email!
Events happen.
I didn't want all that spam that had accumulated in my hotmail account anyway.
No matter how big, or how small, there's only one way to make sure your data is safe ....
.......
Back it up yourself.
Like everything else - if you want it done right, do it yourself!
Seriously, if you're using a service such as Yahoo! or Hotmail for important matters (whether they be family, personal, or business), make sure you make a copy of it somewhere that's in your control
= blue screen of death
~ All comments automatically moderated -1 since 2004 ~
There are plenty of other places people could go to for free email, or they could use their very own ISP for email service. But for some bizzare reason people just want to have a @hotmail.com email address. I dunno, maybe it gives people a fuzzy feeling having an @hotmail.com account rather than @yourisp.com...
It will be interesting to see the final EULA for gmail and their stance on loss of data.
I used to have "dsg@hotmail.com" - I was one of the first users. The spam was phenomenal. I haven't looked back since dumping that one.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Scary? No, that's plain honesty. Which should be respected.
Do you honestly expect your backup provider to cover you in the event of a gamma ray burst in the stellar neighbourhood which vapourizes half the planet within 5 minutes? An extreme example to be sure, but 100% coverage is not realistic, nor is it financially desirable.
I have no respect for any company whose sales staff claim 100% uptime or 100% reliable coverage.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Well I use ibackup and have been pretty happy with it so far. The price is good and they let you run rsync to backup your data which is not only fast but makes it easy to script automated backups from Linux.
I'm not too worried by the comment from the ibackup spokesperson. I think they have to say this as there is always a chance of some dataloss.
Anyway, ibackup is not the only backup I do.
like my e-mail address to every known spammer in the universe. Hell, I'm getting e-mails to enlarge my tentacles and re-grow my third eye through Hotmail...
If the SA's fsck things up and you lose a whole week's worth of work, what ever happens besides you having to do your work all over again?
I would say the people who losted there data, got their moneys worth. not to say that the data was unimportant, but really do you want to trust your data to a "free" service?????????
It would also be interesting to look at the paid email providers too. Does the ISPs that offer IMAP hosting do backups of their customer's emails? I quite like the idea of IMAP, but this issue raises an interesting question. With POP3 email, your emails are stored on your own computer, so you can easily backup email. How easy is it to backup and restore IMAP email boxes?
I had to double check my hotmail.com account after reading this alarming post. I was happy to find all my spam still in my account! Thank you to all the Hotmail.com admins.
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
-- ac at work
At stake was years' worth of personal and business correspondence, photos and the itinerary for a recently purchased trip
why would someone store such important info on hotmail ? The notices saying they can't garentee your data won't disappear isn't there for PR. Its obvious things like this can happen so why not store it on something like a floppy. I mean hotmail doesn't even give you a lot of space. I haven't used it for a while but isn't it 3mb ? At least it was a free account and not one where he was paying for extra storage. That would have made it a hell of a lot worse if he was paying for the service.
I wonder if Gmail has a similar disclaimer?
I mean, its the sensible thing to have, you gotta protect yourself in preparation for the worst.
But then again, Google has not exactly always been the poster boy for completely 100% legal-certified policies... (ie: "We're not evil")
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
Duh. There are no 100% guarantees of anything in life. The only significance of any "guarantee" is the recourse the company gives you (e.g. your money back) if they fail to live up to it.There's no guarantee that your in-house backup system won't eat your data. There's no guarantee your brand new car won't explode. There's no guarantee that FedEx will absolutely, positively, not lose your package, let alone get it there overnight.
"'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
If they promote themselves as providing a backup service then it probably doesn't matter if they say they don't guarantee it in the fine print. They would almost certainly be legally liable for failure to provide the service as advertised if they didn't provide that service. There are legal customer rights which companies you can't get round, forunately. (At least in Europe, but I suspect it is the same in the USA).
100% doesn't exist in the real world. In the real world there are media errors, drive failures, network failures, administration errors, power outages, disasters etc etc etc.
Go tell your system vendor that you want guaranteed 100% service and watch his beeming grin appear.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Look who owns h0tm@il. Seriously though, could you imagine the database beatings thier systems take? Im sure they have xx million email accounts on thier systems. If anyone here runs a server, you will know that even having a couple hundred people hitting a db (forum, cms, etc..) will hammer a db even on a decent machine. Most likely a raid failure, but of course, microsloth wont tell us anything more than "System Events"
and I had two personal hotmail accounts. Since I was on business and in a region were some of what was written in my email would be considered offensive and trust me, my life would have been put into jeopardy so I left the accounts alone. When I got back to the States, I had found that MS purged my two accounts. Nice, huh? When I emailed them, they said, "Too bad, so sad. If you don't access your account every 60days or whatever it is, you loose, f-off."
Don't use MS products or services if you don't have too. It's not cause I think they suck, it's because they don't care. It's as simple as that.
Why not forward all email to a second account with a different provider for backup?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I also had a nightmare at one stage with Hotmail. I logged on one day and everything in sent items was gone. It was due to 'changes in service'. I was not amused and of course there is no way one can actually contact Hotmail - hell I don't know where this woman found their number! I'm impressed.
Needless to say I changed provider which is also free and gives me 6Mb instead of 2 (mail.vu).
Why would iBackup offer it? For some reason, software makers (myself included) have been able to get away without guaranteeing anything for a long time. We don't finish projects sometimes, and even if we do, we don't guarantee you even get what you want.
What is interesting, mind you, is that some consider this more realistic. The way Product Liability cases have been going the last 50 years, software is kind of lucky not to be included. Think of the awards for McDonalds coffee 'users;' people who eat glass and complain there was no sticker saying not to.
If we demand courts throw away the disclaimers of liability by companies like iBackup or Microsoft, it could definitely hurt open source. If they throw out Windows' disclaimers of liability the GPL's disclaimer might not be far off. What if people could sue free software authors directly? That would be scary.
It's a double-edged sword, and frankly, I don't know which way I'd like it to go. Anyone?
Well, I guess it was bound to happen some time! Even with failover solutions, backups, mirrors and whatnot.. Statistically something at some point is bound to go wrong. Be it a combination of human error, hardware failure, bad luck, the world ending, you name it. There will almost certainly always be a combination of things that are near impossible to protect against..
:)
Same thing with Ibackup. Imagine if they promised with 100% certainty that your data was safe, and something occured that killed your data. I can imagine the lawsuits!! They would kill that firm first time it happens.
But still.. Instead of saying that you can't provide 100% certainty of backup it would be better to say that you provide 99.99999999956% certainty.. It's still not 100% but it sounds a whole lot better!
That falls under Acts of God.
But that same gamma ray burst, with only one ray hitting 1 disk drive, hitting the 1 sector that contains your data "root". Should NEVER make you lose anything. This is just normal processing.
That is why raid and tape backups are around. Exspecially since your are paying a fee to them monthly to keep your data safe.
I simply run a script that grabs all my email from my free provider, stores it locally, and forwards it to another email address. It's hardly rocket science.
Of course hotmail isn't much use for this since it doesn't suppoert IMAP, but there are many free email providers that do. Use one of them.
Sadly, data loss is always a risk no matter what you pay. The only thing you can do is take actions to minimize any potential loss. Given that, this really isn't news.
Obligatory /. Fan Service: Oh, but this is Microsoft Hotmail! I'm outraged! Damn EULA!!
That feels so much better!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
With the way people move from their ISP from service to service, its nice to have a consistent email address as you float around.
True, you could just get your own domain and be done with it, but for the average Joe that may not fully comprehend the options, its not worth the expense nor the extra troubles..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have a hotmail account myself because some of my friends use MSN messenger (I use Gaim myself- find me on Yahoo, ICQ, MSN and of course, Jabber). Glad I never actually employed this mail account for mail purposes...
Do other services have a "no business use" type disclaimer? Is Google liable if they chuck out 800MB of your GMail?
Any geek worth his salt has his own mailserver running a custom distribution with his own webmail over SSL, IMAP etc access and half a terabyte of storage. Hotmail! PFFT!
Besides, who cares if Hotmail loses data. I lose data all the time. I don't get upset. Why should I get upset if my email provider loses some worthless mail. Anything important, I make a couple of copies and keep them around on CD, encrypted of course!
Else the problem sounds much larger due to the misstated plural of 'customer.'
Don't let the astroturfing Morons Confused by Sun Equipment win!
There's no such thing as 100% safe data backup - there will always be a chance, however small, that your data will be lost regardless of how well or how many backups you make - if you think you've found a way to make your backups 100% safe, I'll just throw the tiny probability of 'black hole eats earth' back at you :)
All we can do is do our best to put that probabilty as close to 100% as we can. And just like reaching the speed of light, we can never do it, but the more effort and energy you expend, the nearer to 100% you can get.
But problems can still happen, will still happen, and when you have millions of customers, it's suprising it doesn't happen more often.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
That is a 100% guarantee, but is not unlimited liability. Unlimited liability (in case of failure) is not something any business is eager to provide.
You can work 10% harder than you did yesterday. Today you are working 110%.
It doesn't necessarily mean 110% of potential, it can refer to previous efforts.
-Reid
Well,
/.
I thing that 'system events' may happen with any service provider, but because it happened to a MS related company, that's why it's being trumpeted on
I've been using iBackup's rsync server to back up RubyForge for the past year or so. Works great, nice and fast, good times!
The Army reading list
It's events like this that make GMail look more and more tantilizing.
While I've exported my important email to Thunderbird, I still have plenty of non-crucial stuff in Hotmail. It wouldn't have been the end of the world had the files been deleted, but it was pretty disconcerting none-the-less.
I finally sent them an email explaining the problem and my annoyance. I recieved a form e-mail saying I would get a response within 24 hours.... which I didn't. Though all my e-mails have stayed intact so far... but it's only been a few days. If the problem doesn't come back, it seems to imply the problem is fixable.
You know, computers are pretty cranky devices when they aren't already complicated even more by shoddy software, so it's only inevitable that data loss will eventually occur. No manner of human storage is completely and 100% reliable, regardless of whether or not you are paying for a service.
Yeah, it's a damn shame that some user's info was lost. And it's even more a shame that it looks like it was some of them who were paying for it. But anyone who honestly puts complete faith in a human-devised storage system (computer-based or not), has got to get a grip on reality. Microsoft fucked up, some data was lost. It happens, and it can happen to anybody.
If you're gonna pelt Microsoft with criticism, aim for where it belongs. The fact that and manner in which this news was posted to slashdot just comes off as a desperate hit below the belt.
--
Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
with the price of the usb keyrings being so cheap surely its worth saving your email onto one of them where ever you go in the world?
...
The true value of hotmail is your email account is accessable anywhere.
Why not an Isp email account ?
How often do you change providers?
Myself I have had accounts with
demon, fci, virgin, bt, NTL tiscali...
If you use the ISP's email services you have to migrate your email account a pain in the
for me far worse than Hotmail is Outlook Express.
Downloaded Email from hotmail to my PC.
deleted my Email from my hotmail account.
(regaining the space to recieve new messages).
15 Minutes later my Pc logs itself into hotmail and sync's outlook express with my hotmail account.
DELETING my unread mail from my PC.
Is it wrong to think that hotmail is the postbox where i collect my mail and when I want to sync my mail I mean get any mail from the hotmail server that isn't already on my Pc so I can read it off line?
I am sure everyone keeps all their important mail on the mat behind the front door and any mail anywhere else, such as your desk is unimportant and should go in the trash.
I think thats when I really started to hate Microsoft.
John.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Who knew that Hotmail was so combustible?
Now that is a lie by omission if I ever saw one. Was it a hardware failure ? A software failure ? An operator mistake ? An external attack ? A natural catastrophe ?
Of course no one can guarantee a 100% rate of security. In commercial aerial transport the norm is one incident in a million of movements, it'd be nice if the same rate was enforced in IT as a general rule.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
From: coolspeech@hotmail.com (Booted Cat) Newsgroups: microsoft.public.msn.discussion Subject: A suggested feature for Hotmail to hide the user's email address NNTP-Posting-Host: 203.167.192.162 Message-ID: Dear All, Web-based forms are a proven good approach to hiding a user's email address from online robots and spammers. But so far it is only used by a limited number of companies, educational institutes, government agencies, etc. I think Hotmail can provide an option to allow every Hotmail user of this feature. We could add an "screenname" option in the user's Hotmail settings. This screenname is different from the username as in username@hotmail.com. This way, the user can choose to not publish his real hotmail email address, but publish a contact point like this: http://www.hotmail.com/sendto/ Any human who wants to send message to the user can visit this URL and submit his message via a web form on this web page. The message is then directed to the user's real Hotmail inbox. Graphical authentication codes can be used to further discourage automated mail sending programs from access such web-based submission interface. Yao Ziyuan, Fudan Univ. http://www.babelcode.org
It's pretty universal. Take a look at pretty much any other webmail account's usage policy. You don't use it, you lose it.
All joking aside, in spite of the fact that occasionally the anti-Microsoft bias may have gone too far, slashdot was a far better quality site when it was openly anti-Microsoft, pro-everything else. The fact is if we want to read stuff in favour of this disgusting monopoly that has screwed over consumers and unfairly destroyed competition since it began, we can read Microsoft's web site, or wired or some other mainstream, monopoly asskissing press.
The niche that slashdot exists to fill is the niche that Microsoft wants to stamp out, the niche of alternatives, that criticises the generally truly awful business practices and products of this corporation. Now that not only are the editorials seemingly influenced by Microsoft advertising dollars, but in fact a horde of moronic pro-Microsoft readers have come in (two possibly not unrelated events) this site is moving further and further away from the purpose for which it was created. At this rate it will eventually become redundant and just become a news site for Windows users who happen to like legos and wifi!!
And for those of you who like to defend Microsoft against the anti-Microsoft bias you think is so awful: when all we hear in trade mags, from managers, and from Microsoft itself is how great they are, and yet all of our experiences over the years prove otherwise, EVEN THOUGH their products may be improving over what they used to do, WE STILL NEED a space for uncensored (including not moderated into oblivion) criticism of Microsoft. This is the case even if such criticism goes overboard sometimes. If you get tired of reading it, why the hell are you reading slashdot?
It's really disappointing for me to see what's happened here in the last year or so. And it's even more disappointing to have to post this as AC because someone will probably mod it as a troll.
Sigh.
If you don't like slashdot bias, why are you reading slashdot?
This is not a Microsoft fan site! Stop complaining because people who don't happen to like monopoly products forced down their throats are using a community web site to actually serve the community it was designed for!
YES, we like to take digs at Microsoft at EVERY possible opportunity. We aren't doing it to try to win over the support of the general public--the general public doesn't read slashdot--we are doing it because we don't like them, and it's therefore fun and cathartic to trash them whenever we can. If you have a problem with this, I ask you again, why are you here?
My netscape mail has been completely cleaned out at least twice already, including all of my folders. Anyone else have this experience there? I mainly use it as my junk/product mail address, so I only check it, like, once a month or so... maybe that's a factor?
:P
:P
In the mean time, I've been changing my junk/product mail to yahoo.com, since I can download it into my maildir using fetchyahoo.pl . That way, at least it goes through their spam filters once before going through my local spamassasin daemon.
Netscape's webmail also really sucked in that you could only delete spam a pageful of 25 at a time
Just so that I'm marginally on topic, I've been able to avoid hotmail ever since they got bought by MS way back when. I take it this data loss means they finally succeeded in migrating from FreeBSD to Win** Server?
Yes, you get what you pay for, but when something like this happens it doesn't necessarily mean the individual is a moron, it means she can't afford anything else.
I'm in the professional backup/storage management field and can tell you this... NOBODY will give you better than 99.9% reliability guarentee. There are far too many things to break that no matter what, you are likely to either miss something due to a general outage or have a tape/disk go bad.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I was all set to dump hotmail, but about 9 months ago, they did something that really *fixed* the spam. Previously, I was getting over 100 spams a day.
Now, its down to 5, and even those are marked in the "junk " directory.
In the actual inbox, I rarely get any spam.
Believe it or not. In fact, I just started to pay $25/year for a full mailbox with 25M of storage.
You shouldn't work *harder*, you should work *smarter*!!!
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
:-D sorry, couldn't resist.
What kinda phrase is that? Holy events, man, they deleted all my events! There was some good events in there, too...
But naturally nobody wants to pay 120%, 200%, 1000%...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I've known that hotmail occasionally loses mail since... well, since before
they switched the hotmail servers over to NT, anyway. I wouldn't have expected
it to change since then, particularly since it's a free service. In other news,
Yahoo! mail occasionally has quite significant delays (several hours or more)
when sending or receiving, and some messages can get delayed a lot more than
others so that mail arrives out-of-order (which can be really weird if you're
on a mailing list).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
1) people on shared computers
2) people with no computer of thier own
3) people who want access to the information from multiple computer or while away from thier own
Which includes many of the following:
a) college students
b) the poor
c) business people working at many locations and away from a fixed site (note that many networks previously used for internet access are now closed to personal laptops)
d) travellers using internet cafes during a trip
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
Now I don't need to delete my spam
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
Microsoft's Hotmail service has lost customers' files 'due to 'system events.'
I can't help with this one, sorry...
Do you have ESP?
Print email receipts.
Periodically print your address list.
There is no mail service on the planet that can gaurantee it will always keep stuff.
Clicking this link will crash IE6.
From the article: "It's scary," Felton said. "These services are easy and free, so people don't even think about using them."
Well, there you go. That's what happens when you don't think.
Oldtimer: So what if you lose a few megs of mail now and then? Email is like Doritos. They'll make more.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Stop sodomizing goats in primitive and savage places, and you wouldn't have to worry about your little pr0n stash.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
My point is that sentence lets them off the hook for ever backing up your data, much less being ever to restore it.
Nothing personal, but this is total fucking nonsense.
It's a throw away line by one guy at the company. It's not a contract or definitive statement of policy. It's just one guy being honest. They *can't* provide 100% guaranteed reliability. NOBODY can provide 100% guaranteed reliability. You cannot predict the future.
They may do everything in their power to ensure that your data is available, but they cannot guarantee that it always will be every time no matter what. That's impossible. And that's all the guy is really stating here. If you somehow read it as "well, it's impossible, so we don't even try" then you're reading a hell of a lot more into it than is actually there.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I have looked at online applications for small businesses, including accounting, data storage, and CRM, but primary thing amoung many concerns is data loss. While Hotmail is not a business service, the comments from iBackup make me very wary about the responsibility of these types of companies for their customers' data.
Oh horrors! Gmail might have extra copies of your data because they BACKED IT UP! They're evil!
Hotmail just lost your data because their backup was none too effective!
Does anyone else see the dichotomy here?
--- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." ~ Ben Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
Ha Ha
Back in the beginning of 2001, M$ was looking for a storage provider type company to backup www.hotmail.com.
The goal was to do an average 100TB cumulative/incremental backups on a daily basis followed by a huge full backup in the weekend. To my knowledge, not one storage service provider ever took on the job since the subscription cost of backuping the domain won't cover tape library and software expenses until 2050 or something ridiculous. Yes, I did work at one of these providers. Many of the storage service provides actually went out of business by now. I wonder where M$ is today. At least you now know M$ never had efficient data maintainance.
and what would you say to the person who lost their files which were backed up on a floppy? "don't rely of floppies for backups!!". bah. sometimes the person who fucks up the original data is to blame and not the end-user.
subject says it all
three things are certain
death, taxes, and data loss
guess which one happened
Lots of repetative posts here. Lots of logic like "If WalMart has lower prices every day why aren't things free?". Hotmail is free like broadcast TV is free. Somebody has to pay for it and I don't think M$ is willing to give anything away. If you want to get revenge/satisfaction then boycott the advertisers. I'll also bet that all those "Holier than thou" wanks here don't do any back ups themselves and have just been lucky. Observation on the modding here. You get extra points for zingers at M$. So I should get a 5 for saying Bill Gates ate my email.
At our library, you could register for computer time (or even typewriter time! back in the day) and use them for free for a couple hours. This was when I was a kid and computing wasn't all that widespread.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What if a meteor strikes t
Many internet cafe's will - for a small fee - burn you a CD of your data. Of course, for hotmail you would have to paste your emails into word, notepad, whatever - but many of the less-computer-literate type have mastered the copy+paste functions.
It's a pain in the butt, but for some better than losing any "important" data.
Your message won't be deleted ... ever
So... did they try to migrate to wind'ohs servers again?
I am in IT and Rule number one is no matter what you do always always always make sure you have a number of backups and they are tested on some sort of regular schedule.
This is bowlshit - sorry for my french but this is irresponsible adminstration whether the service is free or not - They get plenty of money from spammers and ads - so to me the free service excuse is lame and just a way out - claim responsiblity!!!
My company provides the ability to pay their bill over the internet for free - if we loose their bill or the record that they paid does that absolve me from getting canned just because the service is free - I don't think so.
I bet they never lost billing information for the paying customers. No that would never happen.
I mean god dam Microsoft is a billion dollar company - can't they afford fucking backups.
This really pisses me off so I better stop writing
and check my backups.
Hotmail is pretty upfront with their "check every 45 days or have your mail deleted" thing.
The only problem is that using MSN messenger used to "count" as logging on to hotmail, and then it didn't, so I ended up losing all my saved emails from high school. Ah well.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Back in the 80s, an old mainframe guy I worked with of them told me that no company using IBM computers (at least I think it was IBM) to do their payroll had ever missed a payroll. He claimed that they went to great lengths to maintain that perfect record, and told me a couple stories of recovering data from burned and water-soaked punch cards.
It was a far cry from today's 10,000-word legal license agreements that give software vendors permission to do whatever they want on your system with no liability whatsoever.
Hotmail lost nothing. Passport lost user files.
How do I know?
I tried to sign onto my MSDN subscription yesterday with my passport... this passport is linked to my work e-mail address and has never been used at Hotmail (nor could it), and I got the same error mentioned in the story.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I have to say, I found that incredibly obvious sentiment much more "insightful" when I read it in your comment than when I first saw it, several long minutes ago, in the article summary. The addition of terrible grammar and excessive punctuation really brought the point home for me.
I use hotmail as a "catchall" for people and companies that send me crap. I also use it to read POP mail at work. For $19.95 a year, it seemed like a good bargain. I always swore I would never keep anything there that was "valuable," because I knew MS would never guarantee availability.
What ended up happening is that I was in the middle of an ISP migration, and used Hotmail on March 30th to download all my remaining POP messages that I kept stored (e.g. important or frequently-accessed messages) on my ISP's server before my account was deactivited. Typically I would then go home and import that mail from Hotmail into a local mail file. What actually happened was I got busy for a couple of days, and when I logged in on 4/1 (April fool's day!) I had an empty Hotmail box.
I complained and got a form letter response a couple of days later, saying they hoped I understood, but they had experienced a system "event" and were working to restore data. Anything not restored within 72 hours would not be recovered. Thank you for understanding.
I never got a single message back. Fortunately, none of the info I lost was business-related, only family and event planning data, but it goes to show what MS gives you, even when you PAY for service.
Well, that's fine for MS. But iBackup, now that's funny, you don't get what you pay for. Yet another definition of what it takes to be worse than MS. "We're just as inept, but we charge you more!"
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Here's my service. I guarantee 100% backups of any amount of data for $100 a month, or your money back. Any month that you seek backed up data and I don't have it, I'll give your money back for that month.
I don't have to do anything at all except collect a lot of checks and mail a few refunds. Overall, I'll come out a winner.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
But read their terms:
So the Ibackup service is worthless. They don't stand behind it.
LiveVault offers a warranty, but not much of one. If they lose your data, you get the last three months of service fees back. That's not great, but it's way ahead of IBackup.
If you can work 10% harder today then you were not working 100% yesterday.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
"Frankly, it's understandable. There are always going to be glitches that lead to data loss."
I think this pretty much sums up the idealism behind microsoft products. Complete lack of responsibility towards the quality of their products.
Redundant Array of Free Email Providers: get a Hotmail account and a Yahoo! account. Got an important message on your Hotmail account? Forward it to your Yahoo! account. Unlikely that both will go down on the same day. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No no, you're not getting what I'm saying here.
Yesterday I worked some amount.
Today, I will work 10% harder than yesterday.
Today I am working 110% as much as yesterday.
-Reid
Just buy a really big network pipe and PING remote locations with your valuable data (hopefully encrypted) in the data part of the packet. Then, if you experience a hard drive crash, you can recover all of the data as long as you can get your network connection back within ohhh say 100 milliseconds.
I can care less about Hotmail. Who would possibly use a FREE e-mail account provided by Microsoft for important business purposes? I have had only one Hotmail account in my life. Most of my mail was spam with more spam and more spam. That is when I realized that the service was not worth it.
What concerns me is the fact that other companies tend to lose important customer information. Let's take my insurance for example. I shell out a good chunk of change to get health coverage. The bastads lost my files, claims and forgot to refund money. I am still looking forward to receiving that $800 that the company still owes me! If insurance companies, like BlueCross BlueShield manage to lose my info, then there is no surprise that things go wrong with a free service.
1. Never actually lift a finger to protect data
2. Settle the few resulting lawsuits.
3. Profit!
We guarantee that we will provide Hotmail, with 100% quality of service. If we fail, you are entitled to financial compensation of everything you paid for it by the terms of this guarantee.
What cracks me up about the "big corporations" line is this is the excat same thing free software developers say. "It's free, so you gets what we gives. You don't like it? Too bad, you didn't pay for it."
I think that's a fine attitude with free service/products. You aren't paying for them, so whatever they provide is what you get. If they loose your data, well that sucks, but too bad really. As with everything in life, you get what you pay for.
This is slashdot! We're totally biased to the point of being laughed at by rest of the technology world!
Hail to Slashdot groupthink! Providing humor and insanity since 1998!
Since no one has any clue what is going on, and one would certainly need insider info to make an accurate judgement on this, these comments are yet another reason to feel smug while kicking microsoft.
You gentoo using faggots think you're leet because you like watching all that GCC output whizz by. Gentoo is for ricers!
I think the real shocker is that this lady got Microsoft to admit that they screwed up. If this was me the, the technical guy would have just said, "Sorry Sir, everything looks fine on this end. Can you hold for just a minute? (12 minute HOLD) Yup, no problems have been reported. There is nothing else we can do for you. Thank you for choosing Hotmail. *click* "
Is it just me or does something smell fishy here?
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
If his files were that important, he should have backed them up himself. Just because it's Microsoft everyone gets all up in arms. I don't care what vendor it is. If I have stuff that's critical to me or my business, I am going to make sure that i have my own copy, in my posession. I blame the user for foolishly trusting someone else with their critical data. I don't let anyone hold onto my wallet full of money for me, do you?
Its not that I hate Microsoft, its that I just don't trust them with my data.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Does the gmail service allow automatic or rules based forwarding of email? Could a person forward all the mail that gets filtered into the "Family" folder to another account for redundency or fits & giggles?
If you're not a moron, you should be more than smart enough to make some money.
Although the mail is backed up every night to another spindle in the machine I've told every one of my friends *not to* rely on me as a mail provider - that their free email address was just for convenience and that if the server ever crashed I may recover the mail - or I might just turn the server's case into a barbecue grill.
I had a heck of a time with the FC1 --> FC2 upgrade but wasn't worried because everything was still flowing into mbox files, I just couldn't get it into IMAP mailboxes. Took me three days to figure out.
During those three days I had a handful of phone calls from friends who couldn't hit the mail server and one that was particularly irate that he couldn't access his 15mb (!) of mail. I almost decided at that popint to leave the server down ;-)
On another note I'm part of an IPT working on outsourcing a helpdesk for 32,000 users and one of the requirements they're trying to implement is 100% database uptime with financial disincentives to the contractor if they don't provide.
I tried to explain that 100% uptime is impossible and five nines is ridiculously expensive - but that if that's what they really wanted I'm sure they could find a contractor to bid on the uptime requirement. They're pretty set on the 100% uptime requirement - I sure hope they've got deep pockets.
Oh, wait - they do have deep pockets. The project is being funded with tax dollars.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
That is why I backup by Hotmail e-mail to my MSN account. Even my MSN connection which I'm on right now is as rock solid as my MSN e-mAI@*FDHJ#0+0+[NO CARRIER]
as a going away present...Could you set the PCs BIOS to boot off of CD-ROM ahead of the HD? Then one of these days, you could put a Knoppix CD in each one before you leave. Next time the machine reboots: "Hey this screen looks funny..."
Locking out the floppy drives is probably a "security" directive that dates back to the days when most virii were transmitted by idiots booting with an unsecured floppy in the drive.
We are the 198 proof..
Not a lawyer tax, an insurance company tax. The MDs are caught in a regulated market, just like auto insurance buyers: The state requires you to buy the insurance, so demand is constant regardless of cost, until the cost goes so high that people drop out of the market completely. As long as insurers stay within range of each other, the average market cost increases until we get an "insurance crisis" because prices are unaffordable.
This $100K premium is only buying on the order of $1M to $2M of liability coverage. You can't convince me that malpractice insurers incur $80,000 in costs per policy per year, even if there are a few million dollar awards each year.
We're going through this issue in Florida right now, and when the insurers were put under oath in the state house, NONE of them could confirm the statements they had been making in their marketing.
The AMA should provide a pool for doctors to self-insure, with a sliding scale of contribution/premium according to the total value of malpractice (or other professional liability) claims a doctor has had to pay in the previous 5 years (or pick a time frame).
We are the 198 proof..
.. or at least they did. The last time I checked was last year. Hitachi would compensate your for data loss on their high end storage systems under certain conditions specified in the contract. I have not seen anyone else in the industry (ie EMC, HP, ADIC...) that would come even close to offering something like this.
Keep in mind, this was no where near anything like an inexpensive storage solution.
(Expanding your point)
IMAP keeps a full copy of the mail on each machine. It keeps synchronizing the copies, so frequent backups are needed in case any copy is corrupted. There is a larger chance of corruption (compared to POP3) because any copy can corrupt the rest.
--- HARD DRIVES
I switched to Maxtor after having problems with the others.
- Western Digital is always priced far above everybody else. I dislike that Single and Master need to be jumpered differently. The only "failures" I have seen are when we did not change the jumpers after adding or removing a second drive, although changing the jumpers has required reformatting. Hard drive sizes grow fast enough that WD's prices keep me from recommending them.
- In the mid-90s, Seagate kept replacing a bad drive with dead refurbs. We gave up and used the sixth one as a paperweight. We have not bought one since then.
- In the late 90s, IBM's DeathStars had to be replaced through the distributor. The distributor was annoyed when we were replacing every drive for the third time in less than 6 months. We were not happy about it either. I had one for personal use; the first died within 2 months; the replacement died in 2 days; the reseller swapped it for a Maxtor. A client had bought 60 IBM computers and was stuck with their drives; we bought a few extra so we could send a batch back only once each week.
- We have been using Maxtor since the 500MB days, and only seen one fail within the 5yr warranty. The replacement arrived quickly, and we sent the dead drive back in the new box. I am writing from a PC with a Maxtor 80GB; it is noisier than most drives, and it is really slow the first time the directory structure is accessed after boot. (The latter may be a Windows98 issue. I have not tried this drive with other OSes.) When I first got it, I was expecting it to fail quickly, but it has been that way for 2 years. I still recommend them.
- What brand are you using now? (Serious question. I am buying another drive in the next week and am willing to try a different brand if it is economical and quiet.)
--- OFFSITE SERVERS
Make friends with other techies, or see if your job will give you an IP Address and a place to leave a server. I do both; I do not have a permanent IP address for home. I have my "secure" server at a friend's house, and pay for sharing the SDSL. My websites are on server in a NOC. The manager is a friend of a friend, and I use a machine bought by them in exchange for assisting when they have really difficult technical issues. (The archtypical Slashdotter would be jealous that you have non-techie friends.)
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
So you're in the UK. I am in Pennsylvaia, one of those States in the US.
I have bought very little computer hardware from stores. CompUSA's prices are always unreasonable. ComputerCity was better, until CompUSA bought them and closed them down. MicroCenter is the best chain; the prices sometimes match the web, and I bought the Linux version of MythII for $0.99.
I went to computer shows until the late 90s. Stores would deeply discount stuff for the shows. By 1998, Buy.com was consistently beating the show prices. Then GoogleGear.com started beating Buy.com's prices. Then GoogleGear.com changed its name to ZipZoomFly.com. I just checked 160GB IDE 7200rpm drives there (all prices USD):
$103 = 133Mhz 8MB cache Maxtor
$ 92 = 100Mhz 2MB cache WD
WD's prices are close now, if you do not mind the older technology. The SATA drives are within $5 for identical specs from both companies, so my next SATA drive may be a WD.
I often sleep in the same room as the computers (by choice, for productivity. I have another bedroom I use with girlfriends.) I often shutdown because of the noise.
- I already replaced the CPU fan; Intel was great about sending a replacement, but it took over a month to arrive. Still have the noise, but too busy/lazy to swap drives. This is my MSWindows box, so it would take hours to restore.
I wouldn't want to give a techie access to this box, far too much personal data on it.
This is why you put the box at a FRIEND'S house. Choose someone you can trust. Then store everything in password encrypted files.
About half my friend's are techies, but they keep crossing the boundary. I have been good friends with one non-techie since 1995, but he got a job as QA for application development a few years ago (probably due to my influence.) A non-techie girlfriend introduced me to one of my closest friends: another techie currently starting a construction business, but he still does computer support for several wealthy people.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
You can't blame a software provider for demanding to be released from liability. If you sell someone a hammer, you have no way to keep that person from beating themselves to death with it! We use www.dataprotection.com for our business. Their online backup service is top notch. Jango