Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Barracuda Copy Shutting Down (barracuda.com)

Posted by timothy on from the someone-should-back-it-up-or-copy-it dept.

New submitter assaf07 writes: I received a notification [Monday] that Barracuda's excellent online storage option Copy will be shuttting down in May. A blog post by Rod Matthews, VP of Storage at Barracuda gives the usual business doublespeak excuse. Having used Google's Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Spideroak, I am very disappointed to lose Copy as its native Linux, Android, IOS, and Windows clients are/were wonderful.

52 comments

  1. Well, I guess you could say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Storing the dupe is better than duping the story.
    /sunglasses
    YYEEEAAAAAH!

  2. Apps in The Cloud! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, so you should have expected a Cloud App to get apped!

    Apps!

  3. Duplication by Bob_Who · · Score: 2

    VP of Storage at Barracuda gives the usual business doublespeak excuse.

    That's just like a good clone.

    1. Re:Duplication by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Informative

      VP of Storage at Barracuda gives the usual business doublespeak excuse.

      That's just like a good clone.

      Some of the doublespeak in question, from the first paragraph in TFA:

      We are constantly evaluating our product portfolio in the context of our overall strategic goals. With that in mind, we have begun a process to focus our resources on our most strategic initiatives and to drive more innovation and faster growth within those products.

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    2. Re:Duplication by wjcofkc · · Score: 1

      I usually read some comments and then read the story. Thank you for that one quote, you saved me from reading the story.

      --
      Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
    3. Re:Duplication by MobSwatter · · Score: 2

      What is in question is probably the part that the NSA isn't giving perks for promoting easily accessible cloud storage anymore so why bother with the app?

    4. Re:Duplication by Bob_Who · · Score: 1

      What is in question is probably the part that the NSA isn't giving perks for promoting easily accessible cloud storage anymore so why bother with the app?

      Good point.

    5. Re:Duplication by nametaken · · Score: 1

      We are constantly evaluating our product portfolio in the context of our overall strategic goals. With that in mind, we have begun a process to focus our resources on our most strategic initiatives and to drive more innovation and faster growth within those products.

      We're considering which products to axe and keeping the ones that are doing better.

  4. ownCLoud by Pvt_Ryan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just use owncloud with a hp n40L (or whatever the current model is). Has native windows / Linux clients and android app.. (I assume it does apple too but havent looked as i have no apple products)

    1. Re:ownCLoud by MightyYar · · Score: 1

      This works well for some people (hell, I have a basement server). But I want off-premises backup. Services like Crashplan, Dropbox, etc. are perfect for this. Sure, you could find a technically-inclined friend - but sometimes things aren't worth the hassle and unpredictable bandwidth usage.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    2. Re:ownCLoud by bobbied · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Backup off site is easy...

      I use Open Media Vault which has a plugin that you can copy your entire share onto a USB or eSATA device any time it's plugged in. So I have a RAID 5 array that gets me about 3 Tb of space on 4 drives (and a hot spare). I bought three 3 TB drives and I just rotate them between my offsite location (my work desk drawer) the fire poof lock box in the closet and the file server on a regular basis. This way I generally will have 5 copies of all my data (two in the RAID, one on the attached drive and two external) most of the time. Overkill? Yea, but it's simple.

      When I fill up the 3TB or the cheap 1TB drives start to fail, I'll buy a couple of 6TB drives, grow the array by substituting the 1TB drives one at a time with my 3TB backups and a couple of new ones which will be cheap by then and continue the rotation strategy.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    3. Re:ownCLoud by lucm · · Score: 1

      I have a RAID 5 array that gets me about 3 Tb of space on 4 drives (and a hot spare).

      Then I hope your backup solution works because the day one of those disks shits itself, odds are you'll lose the entire array. Rebuilding large disks with a parity count is long and brutal on the spindle, and those 5 drives you bought are quite possibly coming from the same manufacturing batch and are exposed to the same environmental conditions as the one who failed. You're playing with fire.

      DIsks are cheap, there's no reason to use anything but RAID-10.

      And btw your "bring a backup to the office" scheme is not an alternative to using cloud storage. It's just a way to make it easier for someone to steal your backup more easily than if it was encrypted and stored on OneDrive or glacier.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    4. Re:ownCLoud by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      Then I hope your backup solution works because the day one of those disks shits itself, odds are you'll lose the entire array. Rebuilding large disks with a parity count is long and brutal on the spindle, and those 5 drives you bought are quite possibly coming from the same manufacturing batch and are exposed to the same environmental conditions as the one who failed. You're playing with fire.

      DIsks are cheap, there's no reason to use anything but RAID-10.

      Yeah, RAID5 is cool, but when the array goes non-redundant, the rebuild is the most stressful thing in the world.

      RAID10 is somewhat wasteful - you just move to RAID6, which is RAID5 except now you have to lose two disks before you go non-redundant. Which means when one disk dies, you can rebuild it and still have room for losing a disk.

      Of course, good systems will have hot/cold spares at the ready to start rebuilding the instant a drive goes offline.

    5. Re:ownCLoud by cerberusss · · Score: 1

      Just use owncloud with a hp n40L

      OwnCloud is awesome like that. Personally, I rent a cheap VPS server with just enough disk space for my needs. But if you have the hardware and have a nice internet connection at home, that is also great.

      --
      8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
    6. Re:ownCLoud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      RAID6 has the advantage that you are protected against the failure of any two disks, as with RAID10, if you lose the two disks from the same RAID1 part you're screwed.
      The disadvantage is that RAID6 has slower write performance, as a write in RAID6 writes to 3 disks and in RAID10 a write writes to 2 disks and (much!) slower rebuild of the array.

      With 4 disks, the space "wasted" with RAID10 or RAID6 is pretty much the same: You get 2 disks for data + 2 disks for redundancy.

      If you have the option, you could move to a ZFS pool in RAID-Z2. It's pretty much the same redundancy as RAID6, but since it's filesystem-aware, the rebuild is faster, as it only rebuilds the filesystem instead of the full disk

    7. Re:ownCLoud by mccalli · · Score: 1

      Crashplan is my choice because it allows you to use a friend's storage as well - best of both worlds if you do happen to have some technically-inclined friends. I have the free Crashplan service where I dedicate some space on a NAS to other people, and in return they are dedicated space on their machines for me. Works well.

    8. Re:ownCLoud by MightyYar · · Score: 1

      Backup off site is easy...

      I guess it's a money vs. time tradeoff. I find the online services far "easier" than physically swapping media to an offsite location. It's also more frequent.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    9. Re:ownCLoud by bobbied · · Score: 1

      Yea, I'm an avowed penny pincher and have issues putting MY data in the hands of somebody else, even encrypted...

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    10. Re:ownCLoud by bobbied · · Score: 1

      For Pete's sake... No, my drives are from multiple manufacturers and given their serial numbers from multiple production runs. Seriously, I purchased them over a period of about a year as backup drives for my last file server. They became my primary drives when I retired the old IDE based system and migrated the data to this one.

      My drives are not always spinning and routinely are in "power saving" mode most of the time because the file server is not heavily used. They are not slowly grinding themselves away but are spun down with the heads parked for most of their existence, which is going to greatly extend their calendar life.

      I have a "hot spare" that will begin an immediate rebuild of the array should an active drive fail. I know this works because I've seen it happen in the past when I did see a drive failure. Full redundancy was restored in the Array and the bad drive replaced with a new one in less than a day.

      I have active drive monitoring enabled, which routinely runs SMART tests on all drives, usually at least once every 24 hours.

      I have set up instant notification, which will E-mail me should there be any anomalies in the SMART or RAID status. If I start seeing SMART anomalies or disk failures, I'm going to know about it before the data is totally lost.

      I always have a full backup which is current and online on a totally separate spindle, and two less current backups. (Call it a mirror of my RAID 5 array).

      Seriously, I'm pretty well covered here. Better than most businesses I know.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    11. Re:ownCLoud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This works well for some people (hell, I have a basement server). But I want off-premises backup. Services like Crashplan, Dropbox, etc. are perfect for this. Sure, you could find a technically-inclined friend - but sometimes things aren't worth the hassle and unpredictable bandwidth usage.

      Backblaze might be worth looking at....

    12. Re:ownCLoud by lucm · · Score: 1

      My drives are not always spinning and routinely are in "power saving" mode most of the time because the file server is not heavily used.

      The more I read your comments, the more it reminds me of Michael Scott when he describes Wikipedia: "anyone in the world can write about any subject, so you know you're getting the best possible information". You just bring up bad practice after bad practice and brag about it.

      There's a reason why MAID never caught up.

      So what did we learn from MAID? We learned that power management is far more difficult and complex than anyone had thought, and powering on and off drives up to 10s of times per day caused a number of reliability issues.

      http://www.infostor.com/index/...

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    13. Re:ownCLoud by bobbied · · Score: 1

      10 times per day? I seriously doubt it.. Maybe 3 times on average, and one of those is for the SMART test run..

      Look, my point here is that there is few failure modes here that will cause me to loose the data on my RAID 5 array. I keep viable backups (and yes I test them from time to time) in multiple locations and while it would be expensive, I could recover from a catastrophic hardware failure with my data in hand within about 24 hours. I've seen major businesses with less capable backups and longer recovery times from catastrophic events than what I use for my personal server which rarely sees any use.

      Not to mention, I'd be doing things a bit differently if my business depended on this thing anyway. Instead of running off of the "hand me down" hardware where I've repurposed a bunch of junk into a file server, I'd actually be running the right kind of drives in the right kind of hardware. But like I said before, I'm a penny pincher like my father before me. I drive may cars well past 100,000 miles and 10 years old and I save possibly useful scraps of hardware and cobble useful things like file servers out of it for personal use. But in this case I have a backup system which rivals most commonly used ones in business...

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    14. Re:ownCLoud by lucm · · Score: 1

      I'm a penny pincher like my father before me. I drive may cars well past 100,000 miles and 10 years old and I save possibly useful scraps of hardware and cobble useful things like file servers out of it for personal use. But in this case I have a backup system which rivals most commonly used ones in business...

      While I disagree with using RAID-5 (for anything) I have to give it to you, it's refreshing to see a thrifty attitude in this world of disposable iPhones and 5-year servers EOL. I would be obscenely wealthy if I had done that in the past instead of blowing money to the four winds.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    15. Re:ownCLoud by bobbied · · Score: 1

      Yea, After reflection, using RAID 5 wasn't my best choice. However, I only had 4 disks at the time and it seemed to get me the two things I wanted, the maximum space and redundancy out of the software raid built into the Linux Kernel. I wasn't concerned about read/write performance all that much, after all it's usually connected to via a wireless device (my laptop) anyway.

      IF I had an easy way to do this again, I'd be happy to go RAID 6 on 5 drives and get a bit more space and a bit better performance, but now that my data is safe on the RAID 5 array, the process to convert to RAID 6 would be a lot of work for little gain. Maybe when I build the next one I might have enough drives to go with RAID 6.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  5. Follow the money? by dkman · · Score: 2

    Does Backup have everything that Cuda and Copy do, but cost more. It sounds like one of those "these services that you actually use because they're cheap are going away to steer you toward our more costly services" kind of articles.

    It may be that those costly services don't even have the functionality you were using (ie a Linux client).

    I could be off-base and Backup is pretty different from Copy. I haven't used either.

    --
    I refuse to sign
    1. Re:Follow the money? by scdeimos · · Score: 2
      You're probably correct otherwise this statement from the blog post makes no sense:

      We certainly do not take this lightly, and we appreciate the millions of customers who have used the service, as well as the hard work and dedication of our product team over the past 4+ years.

      If they had millions of customers surely that's a decent chunk of revenue ... or is nobody actually paying for the service?

    2. Re:Follow the money? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They do have millions of customers, but they are paying for Barracuda's spam blocking services, not this storage product.

    3. Re:Follow the money? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      Subscriptions were cheap and it was easy to get huge amounts of space for free - the service was more likely hemorrhaging money as a result.

    4. Re:Follow the money? by greenfruitsalad · · Score: 1

      just follow slashdot deals if you want to see the next service that will follow suit. at the moment it's: https://deals.slashdot.org/sal... a lifetime subscription to 2TB cloud backup service for $49.

    5. Re:Follow the money? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      Heh, one caught my eye yesterday - a life time subscription to a VPN service for $25. Yeah, thats going to last more than a month or so when everyones downloading 1TB a month...

    6. Re:Follow the money? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If they had millions of customers surely that's a decent chunk of revenue ... or is nobody actually paying for the service?

      They offer the largest amount of free storage of any other cloud-based service, which is why I used it. You can get a larger quota by paying for it, but I didn't need that. I just needed a little more than the 2-4 Gig that other services offered.

      So maybe you're right - they didn't have enough paying customers.

  6. Socialize the cloud! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Once again capitalism triumphs on the backs of the gullible proletariat.

  7. Isn't important by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    You just switch to a different Cloud, because Cloud services are interchangeable. Right? Right?

    1. Re:Isn't important by bobbied · · Score: 1

      Yea, you switch... Your data doesn't.... I wonder how long it would take to get my 3TB of data down from the Amazon Cloud they gave me for a year free?

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    2. Re:Isn't important by Harlequin80 · · Score: 1

      Try mover.io You have to give them access to your accounts for the process of moving the files but you can revoke that access immediately afterwards. I have used them when moving a couple of hundred gigs from Dropbox to Google.

    3. Re:Isn't important by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks, I was looking for this just the other day but couldn't remember what the service was.

  8. What doesn't google or dropbox do that this did? by Harlequin80 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I never used this particular system but have used both dropbox and Google drive happily across multiple OS types and I can't figure out what I am missing out on.

    Personally I use google drive which has native clients for mac & windows and use the google-drive-ocamlfuse system to mount google drive in Linux. It is easy to setup and works perfectly. http://gdfuse.forge.ocamlcore....

  9. The usual business doublespeak excuse.... by DRJlaw · · Score: 2

    A blog post by Rod Matthews, VP of Storage at Barracuda gives the usual business doublespeak excuse.

    You'd rather they simply posted "Take this job [order] and shove it, we ain't working here no more..."?

    How about "assaf08 offered us a promotion and 50% more money so here's our 3 months notice..."?

    Finally, there's "A monkey could do this job and our skills are being wasted, so before you outsource us to China we are so out of here..."

    "[W]e have begun a process to focus our resources on our most strategic initiatives and to drive more innovation and faster growth within those products" is not doublespeak, it means that you are 1. not strategic 2. technologically stuck in the '00s and 3. a black pit of cheapitude. It's not doublespeak, it's an overly polite way to tell you not to let the door hit your ass on the way out.

    1. Re:The usual business doublespeak excuse.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not doublespeak, it's an overly polite way to tell you not to let the door hit your ass on the way out.

      I'd rather they simply told me not to let the door hit my ass on the way out. The laconic phrase is practically a lost art in this age of corporate new speak.

  10. Re:"the usual business doublespeak excuse" by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2

    No, you're translating the doublespeak wrong. Proper translation: "We can't make money with this, so we're moving it to the cloud, because CLOUD!"

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  11. Can you blame them? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    They clearly underestimated the amount of space and bandwidth you weird fucks needed for your open-source hentai.

    1. Re:Can you blame them? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They clearly underestimated the amount of space and bandwidth you weird fucks needed for your open-source hentai.

      It's the HD porno stuff that brought them to their knees. How many copies of the same video do you need?

  12. Re:What doesn't google or dropbox do that this did by Voyager529 · · Score: 1

    I believe there are two(ish) things:

    1.) Self-hosted option.
    2.) Integration with Outlook - send file attachments as links, without leaving the compose window.
    (ish) the ability to self-host and integrate with Outlook, as well as one of Barracuda's claims to fame - their spam filter - made sending secure e-mails with attachments a seamless process.

    So yeah, it had its niche.

  13. Re: What doesn't google or dropbox do that this di by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Axway FTD did the same. It is also discontinued. Axway mail gate dropzone does it.

  14. Bummer, most space for free on the cloud by s1d3track3D · · Score: 1

    They offered the most space for free of all the cloud storage providers, 30GB if I remember right. Their web interface was ok, their mac client made me suspicious though, it wanted root privileges to install, my data in your cloud and my root password... no thanks. Neither dropbox or google drive need root privileges for their desktop client.

  15. Did they actually have customers? by Torp · · Score: 1

    For one, I only heard about their service when looking for Dropbox alternatives explicitly. It wasn't so visible.
    Two, I signed up then gave up because their sync was damn slow. So slow that paying for dropbox seemed like the better alternative. They may have improved it after, but I never tried again.

    --
    I apologize for the lack of a signature.
  16. Re:What doesn't google or dropbox do that this did by Drethon · · Score: 1

    The main thing I'm going to miss with Copy.com going down is free 50GB cloud storage. Dropbox and Google don't even add up to that much. May have to look into mega.

  17. That's a problem with the cloud by Cro+Magnon · · Score: 1

    I didn't use Copy, but I've got a bleepload of stuff on Dropbox, and it would suck if it went out of business.

    --
    Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
  18. This feature alone... by Jonah+Hex · · Score: 1

    I used it and advised my friends to use it, mainly due to one feature. If you are sharing a file with multiple people, the size of the files counted against your quota was divided by the number of people it was shared with. Share a 4 gig file with 4 people, each of you only had 1 gig of it counted against your quota. Guess it made too much sense and not enough cents....

    --
    Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
  19. Re:What doesn't google or dropbox do that this did by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dropbox has a sh*tty document tracking system.

    I used it for a year or two. During that time, I had to replace a failed drive. So I copied a backup to a new, local .Dropbox folder, and connected Dropbox to that folder. Even though the local files exactly matched the already-synced files in the Dropbox servers, it considered every file to be new, and every existing file (including their historical versions) got deleted from their servers.

    A month later, when I tried to restore a 3-month old version of a file from Dropbox, I learned that all of my backup history had been deleted.

  20. Alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://alternativeto.net/software/dropbox