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."

Comments

Gmail

[Recoil_42]

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")

No such thing as 100%

[jolyonr]

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