Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Like anything else, including local technology, the key is to create a backup strategy. The cloud creates special problems for performing and managing backukps, so you need to understand your chosen compute or storage cluster provider's options, as well as other options specific for your application in regards to backups.
My blog
I go on the internet within minutes, registering my disgust. Or not.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I forsee at my end to be banished,
By your god for my life and branding
Never around, in the greatness of sorrow,
Screw your god and his UN writ moral.
Stifle god, and the idols of hatred,
Out of my heart, I have always been free,
One with no need all alone and satanic.
Wretched and Vile, fuck your god, de face him.
Who could believe in a lord that's demanding?
Hard to believe when we die we vanish,
In his deny and for all his creation,
Fuck your god and his righteous hatred.
You and your son, you are nothing but absence,
Something not there that controls this planet,
Only deceit do I see in your hallow
If you believe you will dwell in failure.
Fuck Your God, Holy mother for the whore she is,
Fuck your God, bible thumper preaching threats from hymn,
Fuck your god, his revival and the holy Ghost,
Fuck your god; only tell us what we need to know,
Fuck your god, pointing fingers and then do as me,
Fuck your god, you are nothing and you'll never be,
Fuck your god; it is Satan who in trusts my soul,
Fuck your god, where the Christians are I will not go.
Fuck your god!!!!!
Fuck his, commandments, and prophet's left stranded to die,
Not in my heart or my soul as I go through this life,
Good book of bullshit lay dirty with vengeance and lies,
Go fuck your Jesus and get- the- fuck out my sight.
Unity over flowing with anger,
It is our time to remove the savior,
Christians are weak and the bible is beaten,
Homage to god, in this world not needed.
Fuck your god an his annals of plager,
Falling apart and exposing the light,
I will not live by the words of their Jesus,
He did not die to protect or save me.
There is just blood in his book of deceiving,
Riddles and crap to his divine healing,
Fail is your faith and you blame it on Satan,
Christians can't see that their preys are wasted.
Not a slave to religion unrendered,
Falsified god and his Christ redempters.
Never to be in the presence of grandeur,
I am for me and forever after.
Fuck Your God, Holy mother for the whore she is,
Fuck your God, bible thumper preaching threats from hymn,
Fuck your god, his revival and the holy Ghost,
Fuck your god; only tell us what we need to know,
Fuck your god, pointing fingers and then do as me,
Fuck your god, you are nothing and you'll never be,
Fuck your god; it is Satan who in trusts my soul,
Fuck your god, where the Christians are I will not go.
Fuck your god!!!!! Fuck you!!!!
What do you do when your local computer shuts down? How about a server on your company intranet? The cloud is no different. Backups are your friend!
I can't believe this article. The number of places you store your data is directly related to the level of which it's important to you. People put all their data in once place then cry when it's gone? How is this new?
Isn't this akin to dumping all you money into one stock then whining when it tanks?
FLR
Open the curtains and let the sunshine in, and water the garden.
Oh, you mean the network... what kind of fool trusts his data with someone else?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Rule number one is to be able to restore those backups.
Rule number two is to have backups.
Rule number three is if you forget rule number one and two, don't come crying.
And yes, restoring data is more important then backing up.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"Hey look in the clouds honey!
It used to be MyNearlyCompletedNovel.doc,
now it looks kind of like a dragon, wait, no,
now its a UNICORN!"
Have more than on type of backup, online is a good form of offsite backup but always have somthing else.
The critical flaw of cloud computing is that you entrust your data to a third party. If you are at all concerned with privacy you will think cloud computing is a terrible idea.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
What do you do when the cloud shuts down? Nothing. Seriously. This is why you strongly weigh the advantages of cloud computing or relying on an outside network in general. I recently purchased a house that has no and will have no Internet connection. While there my computing change and I figure out ways to accomplish many of my same goals with a limited set of resources. I sort of look at the whole thing as interesting computing problem to solve or work around.
...they can have my local computing and storage capabilities when they pry them from my cold, dead hands. Google is great for looking things up -- and webmail accounts are great for portability -- but the old saying applies: If you want something done (backed up, available), do it yourself. Much more secure that way, too.
Besides, with Remote Desktop, FOUSs*, and continuous 'Net connections, it's pretty easy to take it with you.
* (8GB on a microSDHC the size of my fingernail is a Flashdrive Of Unusual Size in my book!)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
If you want something done right, do it yourself.
Those who would knowingly trust their data to an outside (and relatively untested) organization without having a backup in place are just asking for something like this to happen.
Oh, ya, backups are hard.
tinfoilmedia
Like all current buzzwords people jump onto them with a vague understanding on what they are and what they do. Just to be buzzword complaint. Clouds are rather complicated to maintain and operate and are really for only some very particular tasks. Most companies and people don't need them and shouldn't use them, as it is to much effort for the gain. So you doubled performance however you need 3 times the IT Staff hours to keep it operating smoothly and manage the cloud, it really isn't worth it for most cases. For most places small grid computing or getting a larger server does the trick a lot easier.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Every year, I read the terms of service of a bunch of online backup services, but I have not found one that gives the provider any incentive to be careful. They say they have *no liability of any kind*. Why should I trust them?
I will cheerfully pay to insure access to my data, but nobody offers me insurance.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
I had this overly insightful comment... but it all got lost when I submitted it.
And now look what I'm left with!
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
I thought this story was going to be about MobileMe.
It seems like the data is still there and the only reason they can't get to it is liscensing/ disagreements between companies... at this point I'd sue everyone until they're forced to cooperate and hand over the data
Psssst. Satanists worship a Christian deity. Pass it on.
Nope. Worshippers of satan actually do. Worshippers of satan != satanist.
Satanism is about the consept of Satan. Satan represents everything opposite to what religions do. He is a symbol of following your own desires, not letting others tell you what to do, living and enjoying in the current moment instead of waiting for your place in heaven... Not actually the red, horned creature living deep underground.
Naturally, as with any ideology, satanists are people with different views among them. For some it represents just what I said, for others it represents certain aspects of that (such as not caring about what happens to other people as long as you are happy, etc.) but generally the point is that it represents what you want it to and is thus opposite of religions.
"Any man who says 'Thou shalt' or 'Thou shalt not' is my mortal enemy on earth" is a verse from the satanistic bible.
I'm believe in a lot that can be found in the satanistic bible though a lot of it doesn't fit me. For example, I do get pleasure from other people having fun.
And then, I could argue for hours if it is still satanism. I mean, I act the way I feel best, despite what some satanistic bible tells me. Even christians who do what bible tells them because they want to do those things (instead of doing them just because bible tells them to) are arguably satanists.
I really recommend everyone to actually read the satanistic bible. A lot of it seems to be just bullshit but some concepts are very interesting to think further. The point is that satanism is far too often confused with satan's worshippers, which are completely different groups.
A few years ago, I had my websites hosted at this one company, Digi-Wave. They were great for a few years, but suddenly their servers were down. For a week. Yes, I said a week. The servers came up again briefly before going down again, but in that brief span, I managed to backup my database and files. When I called their support line, I was told that their servers were infected with Code Red (IIRC, I know it was one of those IIS worms). I knew this was a bogus answer because the fix to Code Red infection was: 1) disconnect the machine from the 'Net, 2) reboot it, 3) apply the patch (possibly rebooting again), 4) reconnect to the 'Net. It shouldn't have taken them over a week to fix this.
Then they stopped answering support calls and their phone's inbox filled up until it stopped accepting recordings. By this time, I contacted my credit card company to get my money back and had made arrangements with another hosting provider. I was lucky to have retained my data. Many were not so lucky. And to add insult to injury, after Digi-Wave folded, another hosting company arose with a different name but the same contact information.
The moral of this story is to always backup. Because you never know when the cloud, your webhost, or even your personally owned and run server will go south and take your data with it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
redundancy is the key, use several services to store your data
paid: use something like amazon s3
free: use online storage sites that were around for few years like http://ifile.it/
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.
I don't even trust IMAP to store my email remotely - I still use POP and make backups. I suppose that might change in the future now that the internet is more accessible - my previous internet provider thought "high speed internet" involved their replacing the 33kb modem bank with V.90 units. What can I say, I used to live out in the sticks.
I like the idea of access to everything, from everywhere, but I think I'd still prefer to have the "master" copies at "home" and have the remote files synchronized to that data instead of the other way around. (or, in this case, potentially have no local copy *shiver*)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If enough people tell you that silly claims of 'eternal life' are true, despite zero evidence, many soft-headed folks will buy-in to feel part of the group.
Congratulations!
Blar.
People who follow fads get what they deserve. If you have something on one server, and you know where it is even if it's hosted, then that is at least something. Backups are still important though, obviously. However, in a cloud it could be anywhere. If you lose one part of the cloud then your data is essentially useless. Backups become even more important.
What I do? I get on with my life, having saved all important stuff locally (copy, paste if I need to), and having printed what I really, really need.
If my iLife was so important, I'd use a grounded method of communicating to begin with.
Life deals shit and mishaps on a daily basis, and if what you're doing is so important, invest some time and intelligence into how you save that work. "The cloud" is just somewhere to put the blame when the fault lies between computer and screen.
This is great , this is the best case against the "Software as a Service" model I have ever Seen.
"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."
Let me translate:
1. You don't get what you pay/[paid] for. /dev/null
2. We are not responsible, nyah nyah!
3. You will not be compensated
4. All your data are belong to
What could possibly go wrong, trusting a big corporation with your data?
How hard is it to back up on CDR/DVD/Tape?
This version may be easier to read.
Bottom line: The Linkup is blaming Nirvanix (a third-party service provider) which is, of course, blaming The Linkup. FTA:
Summary: "He did it." "No, he did it." "No, it was him!" "You did it FIRST!" "Idiot!" "Moron!" "Jackass!" ** customers shoot them both **
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
You know, you can use IMAP and set your MUA to cache all messages and attachments locally. Virtually every IMAP client I've ever used has had this option (okay, a few mobile phones excepted). Apple Mail and Thunderbird definitely do. If you use this, you get almost all the advantages of POP -- keeping local copies -- while also being able to easily use multiple clients without worrying about sync issues.
I have several computers connected to the same GMail mailbox via IMAP. One of them connects and caches everything (bodies and attachments), the others only download on command. This gives me a local backup of every message that comes in (via the cached copy of Gmail's "All Mail" folder) but gets all the benefits of IMAP otherwise.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If GMail went down, I would have to.. oh my god... open Thunderbird and look in the GMail IMAP folder.
I was one of their customers (media max) and they didn't even bother to tell me they were bought by Linkup. I just show out at the site one day to upload some files and there is nothing, login gone, files gone, and a lame excuse.
n/t
you had me at #!
I pull out an umbrella!
I may sound like the grumpy old "told-you-so" guy on this one, but who in their right mind would trust the cloud with their important data?
When these days computers and storage are so cheap, why does anyone bother with cloud storage, with all the complexity, reliability, security and privacy issues that it entails?
Seriously, get down to Earth! The cloud is overrated. I will go as far as to claim that the cloud is nothing more than the uber-buzzword of 2008.
*duh*
The cloud didn't go away. One company did.
I use an online storage facility, but I do not store irreplaceable or unique copies of anything there. At best, it's tertiary storage.
Make multiple copies. Stash them in multiple places. The odds of all of them vanishing are almost nil.
And think about what you're trying to protect. Don't be a packrat. Don't waste time and money backing up something you haven't used or seen in years.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I like to take this in a more literal sense. Maybe it's called cloud computing for a reason, and not cloud data storage. If you want to make sure that your precious stuff does not get lost, you need a reliable partner with a good track record that you can really trust.
And even then: your own, intelligently done backups (plural!) should be your best line of defence - even if it costs more time and money.
Do your own thing. And overdo it!
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.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
COME ON!!!! Whooo!!!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Can someone please explain to me why the overloaded term "cloud" was used in this summary? Other than for buzzword-compliance?
I don't see anything related to cloud computing here.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
It was never anything else.
There simply aren't any compelling advantages to trusting some external, remote service with your data that can't be had by setting up your own centralised resources in-house and accessing them the same way, but there certainly are compelling disadvantages in terms of robustness and security. The "Google/Amazon will never break", "I trust Google more than my own guys with my data" claptrap doesn't hold much water in light of several recent incidents of significant downtime and/or data being compromised.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Backups aren't worth a damn if the building is blown up.
So what's worth a damn if the planet is blown up?
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.
Well this all depends on the company. MediaMax/Linkup is not a name I recognize or a trusted industry leader. So I certainly wouldn't expect much of them.
It's like a new banks hows up in your neighborhood that is not regulated or insured or anything. Do you just dump your money there? I would hope not. So why would anyone trust their data to such a service?
I trust Google/hotmail with my email (they certainly do more backups than I would do). Would I trust them with essential business information or something? Maybe... but I'd have to properly investigate their backup procedures... or implement my own. Yet, this article does a poor job by finding one shoddy company and using it as a baseline. Pardon me if I ever do depend on one of these in which case I will be paying for it, that I demand a SLA (service level agreement).
I've been working with a couple sharp folks who had developed some cool technology for their PhD work and wanted to market it commercially. One was a huge fan of RoR and cloud computing. We were specing out the development map of a commercial application of what they had been working on and I had one demand: recode everything in PHP and use the traditional method of load balanced networks and database clusters for scaling.
The entire month of June was him bitching about "WHy aren't we using S3!" and how well Ruby wold scale and the cloud would never go down, etc. etc..
My response was always, "I know the old method will scale and how it scales. Plus we can host that set up ourselves if need be."
Fortunately, the other developer had spent a few years working for IBM before going back for his PhD and understood the priniciple of "Go with what you know until something better comes around and is proven."
Well, then S3 went down. I never said anything, but since Monday, June 21st, he hasn't bitched about doing it the old fashion way.
When S3 went down, something the first developer claimed could never happen,
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I don't have any way of verifying this story, but I worked with an old guy once who told me that he had been at a startup in the UK that was, by the sound of it, creating a kind of IMDB in about 1994. They had a team of researchers and a bunch of seed capital to create a large film database. Everything was ticking along for about 18 months and they had researched thousands of films.
Then one day, the database shut down and they traced it to some bad hardware. They replaced the hardware and restored the database from the previous night's backup. Nothing doing - the backup tape (he said it was DAT) was corrupt. So they tried the other one. Nada. Same corruption. So they tried the off-site one. Same thing. Turned out all the backups they had made seem to have transferred the same corruption resulting in nothing significant recoverable.
Had they tried a test restore at some point, they might have found out. As it was, a week after the crash, they shut the business down.
Which reminds me of another (maybe apocryphal) story: the head of IT as a large company was fond of organising disaster recovery practices by walking into the data centre, physically removing a (pre-ordained) server and leaving a note in its place with the words "The server crashed" written on it. The support staff (and presumably management) knew that this would happen, but not when, or which machine (or dependent services) would be affected. Interesting test I would say.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
If you transpose "data cloud" with "data service" or "data servers" would you then have a redundancy solution?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Don't worry. The new Terrorist Information Monitoring act of 2011 will require all storage to be on cloud servers, provided by a few selected trustworthy and highly secure corporations. The purpose will be to detect terrorist cells before they can do something awful.
The storage vendors will be selected by the government. Naturally, the criteria for vendor selection will be based on the size of the vendors "political contributions". Miscellaneous requirements will include that the administration makes rules as to who can access that information. Of course, the political party in power when the act goes into effect will grant access to itself, and deny access to other parties.
Because the stored information will include voter registration data, votes from past elections, and current votes for each new election, all future elections will be completely rigged. Writing anything against that administration, or suggesting that something might be wrong with the elections, will get you branded a terrorist. Terrorists will be picked up and incarcerated, before they can actually do anything that might be detrimental to the ruling party.
The only problem is, I don't know whether this is scary or funny.
Hi, I hope you are not mad at me. I politly please if anyone could support me by giving his vote on my new WoW server. Please vote clicking here
Or if you would like to play WoW 2.4.3 on my really great server (best scripts), come and register here: bottlenet blizzlike
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.
...get off of my cloud!
before it is useful. "Cloud computing" is like myriad other technology shorthands ("Web 2.0" being my favorite bête noir, but there are dozens of others) too immature to be trusted in production.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Don't forget to archive as well as backup. Sure, you can get last weeks data back, but can you get last years? The year before that? Archive your data as well as backing it up...
I have Internet service from the monopoly Time Warner and it never works. I pay for 7000 kbps down / 368 kbps up and its rare that I get that. If I am lucky, I get 1500-2500 and thats on a good day. Time Warner is clueless.
I also have Verizon Wireless. You know, the one with the best network in the country? Yea, bullshit on that one too. I dont get ANY service in and around my house, even up to a few blocks away from here. What they told me? "There are other carriers in your area". So at least THEY'RE not a monopoly but still..
The cloud is a piece of crap and you better be prepared for a backup plan because it will and DOES crap out.
I worked at an Investment Bank with a very expensive backups system. We only had to use it occasionally when someone deleted a file by accident - but there was one period where we didn't need it for about 3 months. The next time we tried to restore something, we discovered it had stopped working about 2 1/2 months before that. So a regularly testing interval for various types of restores is important to implement.
The random server gone missing scenario *sounds* ideal... but those times the missing server never came back? Yeah, that was me, and no - I didn't work there. Next time, have your IT tester use *company* Post-It's; they're much hard to forge. ;-)
Burn all your junk, that's what I do!
I make it a point to back up my important data to a zip drive, my 30 GB IPod, my 2 redundant flash drives, my old dusty desktop (which is good only for backup and trying out Linux distros), my website. Hell, I even tried to put it in a partition on my mother-in-law's laptop, but she told to back off.... I also take print-outs of my important documents, laminate them and have a special locker for these linked to my savings bank account. The locker is insured for a few hundred thousand rupees... With all this redundancy, I sleep well - with another copy of my important data printouts under my pillow....
If you don't succeed at first, try again. If you still don't succeed, try harder. If nothing works, try reality shows.
I use Plaxo, Weave and Dropbox to do the same things.