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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...
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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
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
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 ?
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
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
It was like.. beep, beep, beep, and all my events were gone. Then I had to do the event again, and it wasn't as good. It was... a bummer.
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.
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'
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.
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.
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?