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."
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
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.
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.
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.
You can have an email address and servers which are totally independent of your ISP if you wish. Just pay around $30 a year to almost any domain hosting company for their basic package and you'll get email, web and ftp services, with your own domain name, for as long as you keep the domain renewed and the fees paid. You can change ISPs and even hosting companies all you like, and your domain (and therefore your email address) will always remain the same.
No need to use those silly webmail systems either.
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 ----
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.
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
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
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.
It's not unrequested. If you signed up for Hotmail, you agreed to get a few marketing offers. That is the price of using a free email provider instead of one that costs money.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
When is the last time a system problem like this affected just one user?
Let me fill you in on something.. Tech support will tell you that you are the only person facing a certain problem even if all of their other customers are having the same problem. They will do that as long as they are sure you can't prove otherwise.
I've my ISP say that even though my whole block was down. I've had a cell phone provider (Rogers') say that even though they sold me a phone with a very high return rate. As well as countless other examples.
It's marketing.. they want to make the problem seem smaller thatn it is.