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What Do You Do When the Cloud Shuts Down?
jbrodkin writes "Can you trust your data to the cloud? For users of an online storage service called The Linkup, formerly known as MediaMax, the answer turned out to be a resounding 'no.' The Linkup shut down on Aug. 8 after losing access to as much as 45% of its customers' data.
'When we looked at some individual accounts, some people didn't have any files, and some people had all their files,' The Linkup CeO Steve Iverson admits.
None of the affected users will get their lost data back. Iverson called it a 'worst-case scenario.'"
True, but the cloud (at least in theory) also gives you ubiquitous access to your data from any location - when it's online, of course. I think it's best to treat it as the centralized synchronization point that you work from day-to-day (think: email, calendar) so that it's consistent across your devices, but have at least one system that YOU control periodically backing up that data.
The issues with services like Gmail and Amazon S3 tend not to be with hardware failures, but with software problems. Recent S3 outages as well as yesterday's brief Gmail outage weren't caused by a load balancer exploding, but by something going screwy in software. Theoretically no data will be erased if they've got permissions set right, but that doesn't mean you're important enough to get a human working on the database to fix YOUR account.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
This is why you should always store your data in more than one location. Yes, put it in the cloud - but also store it locally. Dropbox is a good example of software that does this.
You, sir, are an idiot.
Does anybody remember Visto.com, formerly Briefcase.com? They had an incredible cloud storage and synchronization engine that I still have not found a suitable replacement for, and this was back in like 1998, way before Gmail and all the other glorious Google tools. They were so far ahead of their time it's ridiculous! Only 25mb of free storage, but still, back then, that was unheard of! Back in the day, their *free* service offered a tool you could download to your local machine, This tool would establish a local repository folder for files, which the tool would then handle the synchronization to the cloud. Not to mention integrating with outlook to synchronize address book, private calendars, public calendars, group calendars, tasks, bookmarks, and just about everything. Running this on two or more machines ensured that you were always in sync. Then, to top it off, they offered webmail, and website access to all of your files and bookmarks and everything else. Did I mention that it was *free*? But then the fateful day arrived when I was notified they were changing their business model to sell mobile phone synchronization software. I guess free services don't pay the bills. This was a company who was able to actually sue Microsoft for patent infringement and win... By the way, did anybody else out there in /. world use and like Visto? Has anybody ever found a suitable replacement? Google has a ton of different tools to help fill different areas of the void Visto.com left behind, but I don't think I will ever see another product like Visto come around again.
God look at me, I'm just a man, but you tell me I'm not just a man, so hard to understand, after all, I'm just a man.
That idea is already quite prevalent and many programs such as BuddyBackup already use this idea.
I used to work at a Storage Service Provider back in the dotcom era (StorageNetworks baby!), and before you sign up for any type of service provider that would be providing access to your data you need to go over that contract with a fine toothed comb. Two areas that need to be covered are:
What happens if the SSP goes out of business, how do you get your data back? In our contracts we would give you your data back either via access to the old arrays for X days to copy it somewhere else. Worst case: We drop a truckload of tapes off on your doorstep.
Financial impact of loss of service. We had many financial customers that wanted to make sure we had "enough cash in the bank" to cover their financial losses if they suffered any downtime due to an issue on our end.
Just like picking a hosting provider, you need to make sure you have contingency plans for data loss or corruption. If the SSP can't provide you with the services you need (backups, snapshots etc..), find another provider.
This doesn't surprise me one bit. I was a customer of StreamLoad years ago, and was still using them when they decided to get rid of StreamLoad and merge it with a new version of MediaMax.
During the "upgrade" process (which really felt like a downgrade), and for months afterwards, there was nothing but issue after issue. Accounts became unavailable for weeks at a time. Bandwidth quotas were incorrectly reported. Uploaded files never got processed or took days to become available in your downloadable files folder. Worse, people (like myself) were billed for time when they were unable to even use their account. I have never seen a more poorly managed migration.
The company blog was filled with comments from irate customers until the company started deleting them and eventually disabling comments all together. I personally gave them the benefit of the doubt for a couple of months, but it never got better and I never received a credit for the two weeks of downtime that I had requested. Eventually, I moved everything to AmazonS3, which by that time had become a mature product -- not to mention it was cheaper and *infinitely* more reliable than MediaMax ever was.
I guess after the fiasco that was MediaMax, they had to change their brand name. Unfortunately, it appears that they haven't changed anything else.