Does CrashPlan have a CrashPlan?

Update: (10/21/09)

after 6 days my service was restored and i recieved the following email from Renee in CrashPlan customer support

1. Is this an isolated incident that is affecting a small number of CrashPlan customers or is this a bigger issue?

The issue is isolated to a small percentage of users on a single server.

2. What is the eta of having our data restored and when we can use the service again?

End of day

3. Are we going to get a credit for the downtime?

We are extremely sensitive to our quality of service. First we want you to be satisfied with the service. We are doing are best to rectify the existing situation. In light of your particular situation, we’d be happy to provide you one of following options:

Credit you three months of service

OR

Provide a full refund if you simply do not wish to continue with CrashPlan.

Please let me know how you’d like to proceed.

4. Does CrashPlan have its own CrashPlan?

CrashPlan does have its own CrashPlan. All our servers are redundant at the hardware and disk level. Central 8 is in the final stages of revalidating data.

overall my concern is still the same. I understand a service going down, for a backup service 6 days is a big deal and I might have been able to chill out with some updates and communication along the way.  Good customer service is about transparency and being able to admit things are complicated. hopefully this is a lesson learned.

Cloud Computing Fail?

Maybe cloud computing isn’t quite ready yet?

Since last January I have uploaded over 100GB to two separate online backup services. I first started with Mozy last January and overall it seemed to work just as advertised. Every night for a couple of weeks i uploaded all my data to the “cloud” and then voila; I have a safe off-site backup.  Of course nothing tech is ever that simple.  The first problems started back in July when mozy’s client software wasn’t syncing with the cloud and their customer support  was only vague and scripted responses by email only. After about 3 weeks of no joy I finally got hold of some domestic customer support and by then I had given up on their service.

Next up… CrashPlan

CrashPlan on the other hand seemed much better at the start. uploads were very snappy, and one of the things i was able to do was to move my folders from one drive to another and CrashPlan would recognize it and not upload it again. Unfortunately (like much on the interwebs where much is promised and little delivered) I really should have looked beyond the basics and checked them out further (but more on that later)

funny… as i write this a new client is downloading automatically, but it still says my files are unavailable

The Current Situation

So as I’m writing this there has been no official word why I have not been able to backup for 5+ days. It’s also ominous that this afternoon customer service closed a forum topic (Central8 unavailable) with the explanation that the topic is “wandering off” and suggested that we all individually email customer support. (smells like behind the curtain damage control to me)

I’d say its a pretty shitty way to treat customers who depend on this service as a pretty vital need. I myself have 2 albums worth of “digital masters” and am uploading the mixes of my latest album daily so that if there is a catastrophe that destroys my laptop and external drives (I live in Los Angeles;  Fire, Earthquake, Riot… Hello?) than at least I have a backup in the cloud.   Their  suggestion in the forums to buy a terabyte drive for $100 as a secondary backup is what? throwing in the towel?

“frankly, the entire reason we support multiple destinations is because we don’t believe in relying on ANY single provider, that includes us.  If you care about your data, back up to at least two destinations.  CrashPlan is consistent in recommending this.  Given cost of a 1TB drive is now < $100.. it really makes a lot of sense.”

The whole reason I use this service is that I don’t have to make daily backups of my mixing and carry a drive back and forth to my job so I can have my own personal “off-site backup”

At this point I also feel pretty dumb about the whole thing. With just a cursory review of their customer service forum (or should I say forums here, here, and here) show that they seem to setup and have the habit of quickly abandoning customer service when times get tough. My experiences with both CrashPlan and Mozy show that a consistent online consumer backup service is still really a bleeding edge technology. (or maybe it’s  financially not viable for a company to create a stable and scalable back-end) It’s one thing to suffer through problems of inconsistency with a photo editing program like Pixelmator (which i really enjoy even though it still has some quirks (like when my toolbar goes missing now and then)

So at this point I still don’t know any of the following:

1. Is this an isolated incident that is affecting a small number of CrashPlan customers or is this a bigger issue?

2. What is the ETA of having our data restored and when we can use the service again?

3. Are we going to get a credit for the downtime?

4. Does Crashplan have its own CrashPlan?

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 10:13 pm. It is filed under blog and tagged with cloud computing, crashplan, customer service, mozy, online backup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.