![]() ![]() Only time and lawsuits will tell.įor more commentary on the Carbonite problems, check out Steve’s blog post, “Head in the Cloud? Or Just up your…….?” (And yes, he apparently stole that from Wilbur.The Carbonite online backup service offers unlimited online backup for one flat fee for home users or a business class online backup solution. For all I know, maybe Amazon’s using that exact same approach. My problem with Carbonite’s approach is that they seemed to take my personal data backups even less seriously than I do, maintaining a single copy in a single place. Amazon hasn’t made me any promises about the safety and security of my data. ![]() If there’s a house fire, my stuff might be on Amazon S3. I have my data replicated across my laptop, my Time Machine external hard drive, and my VMware server. That’s the same approach I take with Amazon S3 cloud storage for my personal backups, incidentally: for a few bucks a month, it’s a cheap insurance policy. I can see where Carbonite’s coming from: they view themselves as a cheap way to protect data, and it works most of the time. The likelihood of losing data because of software bugs or human error is probably orders of magnitude greater.”Įrrr, not sure why he’d say that, since Carbonite wasn’t protecting against data loss due to bugs either. “…we don’t replicate data across multiple sites. How about replication from one site to another? Translation: if you aren’t using our services, you’ll never notice when we’re down. But again, unless you were in the middle of a restore when it happened, you’d probably never notice.” “Regional internet outages (we use multiple redundant carriers) would take us offline if they all failed. Carbonite didn’t protect against regional internet outages, either: If the answer to restore problems is to use your live server, that’s a failure. Like Bryan Oliver says, the only reason we do backups is to do restores. “This is backup – not archiving, so if that ever happened you’d still have your data on your PC.” When asked how Carbonite protected their backups, Friend replied that: This is further evidenced by interviews that the Enterprise Storage Group conducted with Friend last year before the lawsuit came out, as blogged by Steve Duplessie of the Enterprise Storage Group. Meaning, they started getting data again from their clients’ machines, not restored them from tapes or other arrays. “Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups…” It appears that their attitude towards backup was that YOUR machine held THEIR backup: when they ran into problems with their RAID arrays, Friend commented that: Worse, it isn’t clear from the interviews I’ve seen that Carbonite actually backed up your data somewhere other than those RAID 5 arrays. That’s pretty dangerous for a company that makes its living off your backups being available. The more drives you add in a RAID 5 array, the riskier it gets, because it’s more likely that one of the drives will fail in the time span of the rebuild. If a second drive fails while the first one is being rebuilt, you’re completely out of luck, and must restore from backup. As SATA drives grow larger and larger in capacity, they take longer and longer to rebuild when one goes bad, because so much data must be copied over to the new drive. RAID 5 will only tolerate a single drive failure – if you lose more than one drive in an array, the whole array is gone and must be restored from backup. RAID 5 is the most cost effective array setup (other than RAID 0, which offers no data protection). It appears that they were putting data on 15-drive RAID 5 arrays. I’d like to applaud his efforts for taking the time to do that, but the comment raised some ugly questions. David Friend, the CEO of Carbonite, left a comment on my blog entry about Carbonite. ![]()
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