Real time backup doesn’t mean every four days
Alright Carbonite, I’ve been patient enough. For approximately four days now I have been staring at the something-is-very-wrong red icon with the little yellow exclamation point in my system tray. The only hint you’ve given me as to what is wrong is the little bubble tip that appears when I float my mouse over the icon that reads, “Carbonite server is temporarily down for maintenance.”
I’m beginning to doubt the validity of the use of the word “temporarily”.
For those of you unfamiliar with Carbonite, it is an online backup service with unlimited storage. As long as you have an active Internet connection Carbonite just does its job and backs up all of your important files to its servers. I’ve been a big fan of Carbonite and have the service running on three computers. But this recent setback is beginning to worry me.
Double-clicking on the Carbonite icon in the system tray only justifies my worries. Here’s what I see:
Awaiting backup: 44.0 MB (313 files)
That means that 313 files, representing 44.0 megabytes (MB) are at risk on my computer because they have not been backed up to the Carbonite servers.
Carbonite, are you listening? This techie is starting to lose faith in your service.
2 comments for this blog post so far...
March 14, 2008 at 11:00 am
None
Do a Google news search, or a Google blog search for Carbonite (sort by date) and you’ll see that you’re not alone.
As I suspect that Carbonite also does these searches, don’t be suprised if you now have Mr David Friend, CEO of Carbonite making contact with you to tell you things like:
- It was a planned outage
- We informed all of our users, in advance
- Because this post is by “anonymous” it is malicious and all lies
- Only 1,100 or so users were affected
- It (the outage) only affected certain version numbers of the software
- The outage was for shorter than some have claimed, then present you with “evidence” of this
...and so on.
Have a hunt around and you’ll see what I mean.
By the way, I’m in the same situation as you. I’m hoping that this post might help bring some shame to Carbonite so as to spur it to get its act into gear.
Ohh, you’ll also see that Carbonite has gone into PR overdrive by releasing details on how many files it has saved (recovered) for its users. This PR campaigned launched the day after its outage, oops sorry. scheduled outage.
March 14, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Len - Carbonite
Hi folks,
A few quick notes:
There was a scheduled server upgrade on Sunday night (early Monday morning, actually). The server was down for approximately three hours. Minus another short downtime this morning to put a few additional safeguards directly related to this issue in place, there hasn’t been any other server downtime (in over a year, for that matter).
Some Carbonite users - okay, a lot - did not reconnect properly when the servers came back online. Most of these folks were using Carbonite version 3.5.89. This just happens to be the version most of our customers are using right now.
Our server reports initially reported a smaller number of affected users than there actually were (hence the lower figure you saw). We later realized more users were affected. We changed our incoming phone message, added a service alert to the website, and sent an e-mail to affected users.
Any PR campaign going on right now was likely scheduled quite some time ago, and is certainly not a reaction to the issues above.
At any rate, the fix is very simple. For most folks, all that is necessary is a hotfix available at http://www.carbonite.com/download/CarboniteHotFixV3589.exe which will start Carbonite right back up and takes just a moment to download and run. Some folks may need to reinstall Carbonite, which is also easy and quick:
1. Log in to your account at http://www.carbonite.com/manage
2. Click on the “My Protected Computers” tab.
3. Click the button entitled “Reinstall” and follow the on-screen prompts.
Please contact us if you are still having difficulty after following the instructions above. We certainly apologize for the frustration this has brought to our users.
Sincerely,
Len Pallazola
Manager, Customer Service Systems
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com
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