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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!
= blue screen of death
~ All comments automatically moderated -1 since 2004 ~
It will be interesting to see the final EULA for gmail and their stance on loss of data.
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.
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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...
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).
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 don't see how that will guarantee it.. accidents still happen. Tape drives fail. Hard disks get dropped into tubs of jelly, etc.
The only way to truely secure your data is to hire a team of tibetan monks to each remember 1/5th of it. THen they can sing it back to you.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
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?
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 ----
Better still, hire half a dozen and RAID them.
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.
Would that be a MONK-5 array or a a Beowolf Cloister?
The problem is that for most people Hotmail is NOT a stupid place to keep important info.
Its backed by Microsoft so oviously its secure.
Just remember that most people who use Hotmail are not Geeks and they do beleave the hype.
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
Redundant Enlightened Array of Monks -- REAM them!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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 use mine on Usenet posts and Slashdot. It allows people I don't know to get in touch without exposing a real address. The spam gets filtered to my junkbox, which is good. However, the "Microsoft update" virus crud (harvesting from Usenet) also goes there, and at 144k per "update" it doesn't take long to fill the freebee quota. I could have it immediately delete junkbox email, but there have been false positives. So I have to visit once a day or so to scan for real email, then flush the "updates" and the letters from PRINCE MOYO SITHOLE.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
Incidentally hotmail spam is unblockable. I.E. The unrequested marketing that hotmail sends you, if you try and block the address it says you can't, so that hotmail can send you "important" information.
im in ur
Switch to Yahoo! Mail.
Switch to pop3! Wait, is this not slashdot, where everybody has their own web/mail server in their kitchen? Why stick with the web crap, really?
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