TechCrunch reports that Carbonite, an online backup company, lost customer data.
But wait, this is different: it’s not their fault. They’re suing Promise Technology, makers of popular storage gear, for selling them bogus equipment. Bogus equipment? You mean, like hard drives that fail? That’s horrible! Who could expect something like that? Who could know about the dangers that lurk around every corner?
The Statistics are Staggering Alright
Carbonite’s web site warns, “You need to be aware that losing your most valuable files is a very real possibility. You need to take proper precautions.”
Who knew they were referring to their own services?
Don’t point and laugh and say it could never happen to you because you do your own backups in-house, because I’ve seen too many backup strategies fail for too many reasons. For the love of your own job, never mind your company’s revenue stream, take some time this week to:
- Automate your backup testing – build a set of T-SQL scripts to automatically restore your production databases onto another server. Restore a different server every day onto the same target testbed box.
- Test your backups manually – if you don’t have the time to script the tests, just go run a restore of your largest backup. Ideally, check the ones that hit tape, because those are the most risky.
- Check every server’s job logs – I’ve seen so many cases where backups stopped working on a SQL Server, and alerting had also long ago stopped alerting. These two failures are a 1-2 punch to the jaw of your career.
- Find your single points of failure – if you’re relying on a single cloud vendor for all of your data protection, that’s a risk. If you’re backing up straight to tape and you’ve only got one tape jukebox in-house, that’s a risk.
- Figure out who you’re going to sue – because hey, work is hard. If you can’t do it right, get rich trying.
Jack, I never had a problem restoring with either Backblaze or Carbonite. Mind you these weren’t major restores.
“the backups are flawed due to extension skipping that is impossible to work around”
Carbonite has an option to “Back up files of this type” when you go to properties of an item.
Is this representative of the quality of your research?
Because you’re also the guy who claimed Carbonite is “mostly” pages running inside an IE control, so your technical “expertise” is on full display here.
Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re a shill for Mozy.
Carbonite skips critical files by default
there is no acceptable workaround for this
as you have to know which files it will ignore
AND find an instance of such a file in order to use the “back up files of this type”
In reality this can be a huge multi-hour task.
Carbonite UI uses IE-specific HTML generated from a custom webserver.
This is wrong for many many reasons.
1) Not everybody uses or wants to use IE
2) It is not a robust approach to UI (this can be seen by frequent javascript errors etc.)
3) It forces users to stick with certain version of IE otherwise they “lose” their Carbonite functions
4) It just isn’t a good idea – it works well for hybrid windows/web applications – but Carbonite isn’t a good candidate for such an approach – that is why NO OTHER online backup service uses such a low quality kludge approach.
As a developer of web, windows and security software with 14 years experience I know what I’m talking about.
I am not a “shill” for Mozy … I just believe it is the best consumer-grade online backup service that I have tested.
No real Carbonite user would sing their praises.
Jack, I found the workaround for making Carbonite back up all extensions after 30 seconds of Googling.
I’ve never had Javascript errors on Carbonite on 3 computers I’ve used it on.
The whole “not everybody uses IE” debate is so 1998. Whether you like it or not, it’s become a part of Windows, and there are many projects that rely on its presence for providing simple functionality.
It’s functioned fine for me on Internet Explorer versions 6 to 9, as no doubt intended – there’s no “forcing” users to do anything, and it never forgot my preferences.
And again, I don’t know what you mean by “low quality cludge approach”, because the heart of Carbonite is clearly efficient. It is more optimized than Mozy (by a long shot) and more optimized than Backblaze. It is as close to distraction-free backup as I’ve ever found.
An “experienced” developer should be able to see past the GUI part of the product and understand where the real work was being done.
“Jack, I found the workaround for making Carbonite back up all extensions after 30 seconds of Googling”
Please advise me how
Please also advise how to use Carbonite to backup and restore EFS files.
Also how to use Carbonite on a machine that does not use IE as its default browser etc.
You will find, as most Carbonite users have already, that things start to go badly wrong – as Carbonite incorrectly make assumptions about the configuration of the PC.
I had to reconfigure my PC just so Carbonite would work at all.
Browser applications are not as robust as compiled windows applications – they are designed for multi-client wan/internet applications (at which they are great) creating a single-client (IE) local-machine web application like Carbonite has is a very foolish decision – the end result is a very fragile UI plagued with security problems, performance issues and bugs = Kludge.
I use carbonite and my default browser is Chrome. It works just fine.
I’m seeing a lot of these hiccups and losses with the big traditional backup providers. I’d recommend giving http://www.absorb.com a lookup.
They send an appliance over to you that manages all of your scheduling and if you do have a loss on your side you have the option of pulling the data off of the local equipment. Its a little less stressful than handling a 4 day online download. There is an added level of security too because the equipment they send talks to the remote backup provider through mac address security.