Online Backup

Too much data center traffic throws off MozyHome clients

Mozy says a high volume of traffic is to blame for a backup monitoring glitch flagged by a MozyHome user on his blog, but the online backup service says it has not lost any customer data.

Dan Frith, a technical consultant in Australia, wrote on his blog Penguin Punk earlier this week that he was seeing some quirkiness in Mozy’s monitoring interface. He’s been using MozyHome to backup an iMac with approximately 32 GB of data, he wrote, but last weekend the Mozy interface was only showing him 10.3 GB backed up at its data center.

Frith’s posts (which include screenshots) also detail his interactions with Mozy support to get the problem sorted out, including the full text of an email Mozy sent him saying that if he initiates a full backup again, Mozy will “re-associate” the full data set with his account.

Frith indicated he’s unimpressed with the workaround Mozy has suggested. “The point is that if I needed to recover data from Mozy today I would only be able to get back 10.x GB,” he wrote. “That seems uncool. Very uncool.”

Mozy responded to my request for comment with a statement through a spokesperson:

recently, we experienced a high volume of data center traffic that prevented the Mozy client from adequately identifying files that were previously backed up. As a result, Mozy is sending third or fourth copies of the same files to our data centers.

Our development team is working right now to address the issue and expects to have this fixed soon. We want our customers to know, however, that we have not lost any of their information.

This is not the first complaint to surface about Mozy recently. In September, backup expert W. Curtis Preston also blogged about how his Mozy agent didn’t notify him it wasn’t backing up data. Last year, commercial users of MozyPro also said they were frustrated by long restore times with the service.

LiveDrive looks to hop across the pond with online data backup

U.K.-based LiveDrive, a competitor to consumer online backup services like MozyHome and Carbonite, is getting U.S. distribution thanks to a new partnership with LifeBoat Distribution.

Online marketing manager Jamie Brown says LiveDrive has 300,000 unique accounts worldwide, 120,000 of them already located in the U.S. LiveDrive creates a network drive that shows up on users’ PCs. Any files sent to that L:\ drive will be backed up to LiveDrive’s cloud; data can be stored there for safekeeping or users can use LiveDrive to keep the L:\ drive synced and share data among multiple machines. Users can also access their data through LiveDrive’s Web portal, which also offers mini-applications that allow users to edit or play back photos and video.

The company has data center infrastructure in the United States through collocation, but currently all users access data through load balancers in the UK. Brown said there are plans to expand the US infrastructure organically, but won’t rush, saying currently users aren’t experiencing performance issues with the way the infrastructure is set up.

After a year, though, Brown said LiveDrive hopes to have an office in the US within 12 months, and may also add a business-level service to compete with services like MozyPro and i365’s EVault Small Business Edition. It currently does not offer service level agreements or geographic redundancy for consumer users.

Despite its claims about its client base, LiveDrive was unable to provide a public customer reference before the announcement this morning.

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Lauren Whitehouse said this is becoming an increasingly tough space for new players to differentiate themselves in. “Mozy has more than a million customers, and for Symantec’s SwapDrive the number’s even greater,” she said. “LiveDrive has plenty of formidable competition.”

One factor that might hurt LiveDrive, at least in the beginning, is the fact that data must currently be accessed through the U.K. “Anyone who has discomfort sending data out to the cloud might have more discomfort knowing there’s a geographic distance there,” Whitehouse said. Even if performance isn’t bad, “there could be ramifications if there’s a dispute.”

As for the differentiation of being able to manipulate content within the cloud, Whitehouse said LiveDrive will also face competition from players like Memeo and Ricoh’s Quanp, to say nothing of photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket, boith of which offer small photo-editing software suites with their services. “It’s somewhat of a Wild West situation right now ith different companies trying to do a ‘land grab’, capturing customers and then building from there,” she said, including LiveDrive in that mix.

Backup expert takes issue with Mozy notifications

Backup expert and Tech Target executive editor W. Curtis Preston Friday wrote on his Backup Central blog about a discovery he made regarding MozyHome online backup service – something he wasn’t pleased with. When he switched laptops and didn’t re-install the Mozy client, Preston wrote, Mozy kept charging him for 11 months without backing up data or connecting to his workstation.

Preston didn’t lose any data and acknowledges it was his fault that he didn’t re-install the Mozy client when he got a new laptop. “I’m not saying that the fact that I didn’t use their service for 309 days was even their fault,” he writes,

What I’m saying is that for almost a year they took my money to perform a service, they knew I wasn’t using that service, and they never said squat. This is a typical business model for an ISP…but this isn’t an ISP. It’s a backup service. They don’t know I’m Mr. Backup. I could just as well be my Mom (who is on Mozy) and have no idea that I’ve done something dumb like accidentally uninstall the application or set it never to backup. When you’re selling a backup service directly to the consumer, the least you owe them is an email if they’re not backing up, don’t you think? I still like Mozy. But I think they should change this practice…

We reached out to Mozy to determine their notification poliy, whether you are Mr. Backup or not, and they emailed the following response:

We decided to put our notifications in the client instead of in e-mail because people get so many e-mails that they may miss the notification. We want our customers to know if a backup isn’t happening. For this reason, the client pop up box doesn’t go away until you click to remove it. That said, we expanding our notification options so that people can have more ways of receiving notifications than through the client only.

Keep in mind that [Preston]was still using the Mozy service even though he wasn’t sending new files to us. We were still storing his information, which includes the power, cooling and management costs incurred to keep his data protected.

Mozy rivals including Carbonite notify users outside the client, according to Preston. “Competitors catch those who uninstall it unintentionally or forget to reinstall after a system change,” he pointed out.

This isn’t the first complaint to surface about Mozy, which EMC Corp. bought in 2007. Users have also complained of slow restore performance last year, a problem Mozy officials blamed on an “isolated bug”, saying customers affected by slow restores would receive discounts or have subscription fees waived in response.

Carbonite a guinea pig for Sun’s Java “app store”?

Carbonite made a big splash in the consumer space this week with the announcement that Sun Microsystems Inc. (soon to become part of Oracle Corp.) will offer a free 30-day trial of its online backup service to Sun customers who upgrade to the latest version of Java or download it for the first time.

Java’s about the most ubiquitous Web interface in the consumer world, so it’s a pretty major coup for Carbonite in its quest to compete with much bigger companies in online backup like Symantec and EMC Mozy. Carbonite’s press release puts Java’s reach at 800 million personal computers.

It’s unclear what proportion of that number is represented by Sun’s direct Java share, since Java is licensed by a number of third-party companies who develop their own custom code. But since Java prompts users for updates automatically, without them seeking out the service, it seems like it should be a pretty effective tool for putting Carbonite in front of users, whether or not they actually take the offer. (One aside here as a PC user myself - the constant “Java update available” reminders are annoying enough. If I have to click through multiple advertisements on my way to installing them, I can see getting very annoyed very quickly…so, of course, it all depends on the consumer response).

“It’s an interesting distribution model for Carbonite,” said Forrester Research analyst Stephanie Balaouras. “It’s not clear how it benefits Sun technically, I’m sure there’s a monetary benefit.”

But this is where things get really interesting - in the course of my conversation with Balaouras I ran across a post on Jonathan Schwartz’s blog discussing a new plan to offer an “app store” in association with Java (if that name sounds familiar, it’s because of Apple’s already-popular App Store service for the iPhone and iPod Touch).

According to Schwartz:

…not all Java runtimes are the same. For most devices, from RIM’s Blackberry to Sony’s Blu-Ray DVD players, original equipment manufacturers (known as “OEM’s”) license core Java technology and brand from Sun, and build their own Java runtime. Although we’re moving to help OEM’s with more pre-built technology, the only runtimes currently that come direct from Sun are those running on Windows PC’s.

And oddly enough, that’s made the Windows Java runtime our most profitable Java platform…a few years ago, we called our friends at one of the world’s largest search companies (you can guess who), to talk about helping them with software distribution - because of Java’s ubiquity, we had a greater capacity than almost anyone to distribute software to the Windows installed base. We signed a contract through which we’d make their toolbar optionally available to our audience via the Java update mechanism. They paid us a much appreciated fee, which increased dramatically when we renegotiated the contract a year later. 

The post, which is about two months old and written in anticipation of the JavaOne conference in June, goes on to announce a new business model being pursued by Sun:

The revenues to Sun were also getting big enough for us to think about building a more formal business around Java’s distribution power - to make it available to the entire Java community, not simply one or two search companies on yearly contracts.

And that’s what Project Vector is designed to deliver - Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we’ll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world’s largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX.

“Everyone.” Schwartz points out, “craves access to consumers.” Particularly in the storage and storage software-as-a-service (SaaS) markets, where consumers are the focus of growth.

Control over Java has been considered the primary focus of Oracle’s intention to acquire Sun. It’s hard to imagine Sun doing any deal right now that didn’t meet with Oracle’s approval, but stranger things have happened… “This seems opportunistic, not a strategic alignment with one online backup vendor over another,” pointed out Balaouras. ”It’s also a consumer, SMB play. I’m not sure how much Oracle will care at the moment.”

But if Carbonite can be distributed to consumers through Java, so could virtually any other online backup and storage service. And Schwartz’s post about Project Vector and the partnerships with search engines show Sun is willing to acquiesce to the highest bidder:

The year following [the initial search engine toolbar deal], the revenue increased dramatically again - when an aspiring search company (again, you can figure out who) outbid our first partner to place their toolbar in front of Java users (this time, limited to the US only). Toolbars, it turns out, are a significant driver of search traffic - and the billions of Java runtimes in the market were a clear means of driving value and opportunity.

It will be interesting to see if Carbonite’s competitors make any counter-moves. It will also be interesting to see how significant a channel to market Sun’s Java becomes for cloud storage vendors - could Sun have a last laugh in storage after all?

Carbonite sues Promise Technology for unreliable storage

Online backup service provider Carbonite is suing Promise Technology, claiming that the storage vendor’s arrays did not perform to specifications and prevented Carbonite users from restoring their files.

The lawsuit, as reported by the Boston Globe, was filed in Suffolk Superior Court last week and alleges that Carbonite “suffered “substantial damage” to its business and reputation from products manufactured by Promise Technology Inc. and marketed to Carbonite by Interactive Digital Systems Inc,” which is also named in the suit.

According to the Globe story and other reports over the last several days, Carbonite alleged that it lost 7500 customers’ data in several separate incidents because of the problem with Promise, but Carbonite’s CEO has since released a statement saying that number is misleading:

The obvious question becomes, why is Carbonite suing two years later if there have been no further problems? If there have been no further problems, how can Carbonite prove damage to its business and reputation? It sounds like PR-wise, Carbonite is trying to do two different things at once: present a dramatic story to the court in the hopes of winning the lawsuit, while minimizing the drama to its potential customers who may be reading in the press. They probably can’t have it both ways.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson from Promise sent the following statement to Storage Soup this afternoon:

We have looked into Carbonite’s allegations and believe that they have no merit. Our investigation indicates that our products were neither implemented nor managed using industry best practices. … We look forward to a successful conclusion to this matter that demonstrates the quality of our products and our overall commitment to the customer.

I will give Carbonite points for chutzpah, though. Imagine if every enterprise storage user sued their vendor over problems like this. It’s a pretty good indication that storage for cloud services will be under high scrutiny, even as every storage vendor tries to climb aboard the cloud bandwagon.

The Internet cries foul over Carbonite Amazon reviews

A story from a New York Times blog by David Pogue has ignited the tinderbox that is the Internet, and the flames are being directed at online backup service Carbonite. The conflagration is over glowing reviews of the service on Amazon by insiders at the company who did not divulge that they worked for Carbonite.

The reviews, written in December 2006, were first brought to the attention of the New York Times by a Carbonite customer identifying himself as Bruce Goldensteinberg, who has also posted screenshots of the original reviews on a Picasa blog.

Carbonite has posted an official response to the issue on its website, claiming policies were not in place at the time but have since been updated. Carbonite CEO David Friend has also responded directly to Pogue’s blog with a claim that Carbonite’s uppermost management was not aware of the bogus postings until they were brought to public attention.

This is where things really get interesting–Pogue also disputes that claim, referring to the comments section of another post about Carbonite where one of the first comments discusses the bogus reviews. David Friend posts comment #29 on that same thread, leading Pogue to argue that Carbonite was aware of the reviews at least since September and is only “cleaning up its act—now, after it’s been caught.”

I followed up with Carbonite myself about this, and received this response from a spokesperson:

In 2006 a few reviews were posted by employees who did not disclose their employment affiliation. That was a mistake and we apologize. This has long since ceased and will not happen again.

Pogue’s post also can be seen as responding to this pre-emptively:

It doesn’t matter to me that Carbonite’s fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old. These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves.

In Carbonite’s defense, I do think the level of recrimination they’re getting is a bit disproportionate to the problem of the reviews. Mr. Goldensteinberg became disgruntled when he experienced a crash, difficult restore, and delayed customer support. That’s a more important core issue for an online backup company than marketing tricks that are not unique {Pogue’s blog points out a more recent similar incident involving Belkin).

Slow restores may also be the way of online backup, especially if users are looking to restore an entire system, at this stage of its development. EMC Corp.’s Mozy was hit with similar angst among its users last year over similar problems–it, too, was forced to revise its up-front disclosures to users about restore times.

Bottom line: the Internet is all about word of mouth, but doing business oftentimes can’t be. Forget about Amazon reviews, and make sure you get an SLA from your online backup service provider in writing before you deploy the service.