Trapped in Carbonite?
Carbonite is one of the leading online backup brands. A recent post on their blog explains part of their backup strategy:
What you're looking at are arrays of 16 1TB data-center grade drives in a RAID-6 array. 3 of the 16 drives would have to fail simultaneously before we would lose any data. This RAID configuration is 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive. Generally we don't even wait for a drive to fail - we have software that can tell when a drive is starting to get flakey and an alarm goes off on our operations console.
Only last week I said:
Is there a backup of your backup? Many online backup companies have a single datacenter. While it's much less likely that this will fail than your computer it's still a single point of failure.
This morning The Boston Globe is reporting that Carbonite has filed a lawsuit against two suppliers. According to the article the suit claims:
Carbonite lost the backups of over 7,500 customers in a number of separate incidents, causing serious damage to Carbonite's business and to its reputation as a reliable source for backup data service.
The lesson here is that for the files you care about you really need at least two backups. Ideally you should have a local backup for convenience and an offsite backup in case of disaster. Local backup alone doesn't cut it and it's becoming increasingly clear that you shouldn't rely on online backup either.
posted by Rob on Saturday, March 21, 2009
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Not only has Carbonite apparently lost data, when you really need help from customer service, you end up in an endless loop of trying things that have no relevance to the matter at hand.
Half the time the so-called support people don't even read the whole email to fully understand the problem. I mean, what's the point of giving them information about problems with THEIR system if they don't even read it.
Yes, I'm a disgruntled Carbonite customer - disgruntled with good reason.
Or better yet, look for an offsite service that replicates your data in multiple locations in addition to your local copy. Once the data has been sent to the first offsite location, it can be sent to a second one, so there are four copies of your data in total. The local copy provides for quick restores and the two offsites mean that you are protected from a disaster at your location that occurs at the same time as a disaster at one of the remotes.
WOW I just got an email from one of my clients, who was considering Carbonite, to cancel immediately. Also from another to look into their data integrity. Luckily I still have them running on-site tape backup. Good call Linda. That had always been my philosophy.
I would like to make sure that your readers understand two points with regard to Carbonite’s lawsuit against Promise Technologies:
1) This event happened over a year ago. We do not say this to minimize the matter. But we do want to point out that this has not happened in a long time and is not an ongoing problem.
2) The total number of Carbonite customers who were unable to retrieve their data was 54, not 7,500.
Here is what happened: The Promise servers that we were purchasing in 2006 and 2007 use RAID technology to spread data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don't lose any data. The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as "firmware" in the storage servers. In this case, we believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs that caused the servers to crash. Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups and more than 99% of these were completely restored without incident. Statistically, about 2 out of every 1,000 consumer hard drives will crash every week, so 54 of these customers had their PCs crash before their re-started backups were complete. Since they weren’t completely backed up when their PCs crashed, these customers were unable to restore all of their files from Carbonite. Most of the 54 got some or most of their data back. We took full responsibility for what happened and I did my best to call each of these customers personally to apologize.
As a result of our problems with the Promise servers, we switched to a popular Dell server that uses RAID6 – an improved RAID that allows for the loss of 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously before you lose any data. This configuration is in theory 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive — the chances of 3 out of 15 drives failing at the same time are almost nil.
So far, Promise has refused to accept responsibility for their equipment’s failures, so now we are suing them to get our money back. The Dell RAID servers have been flawless and we're extremely happy with them.
Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
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