
Why I no longer trust EMC  - thekguy
http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-i-no-longer-trust-emc.html
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roel_v
I was a paying customer of Mozy. Their 'restore' does not do resume. Yes, that
means that after restoring 50 GB and losing internet connection, you have to
restart.

Needless to say I was quite happy that I tried the restore before I actually
needed it. And also that I'm not a Mozy customer anymore, although I'm still
paying them so I guess technically I am - but that's just because they refuse
to cancel my subscription and keep charging my credit card.

Lesson learned: stay away from Mozy, and EMC for that matter.

~~~
btilly
If they are charging your credit card at this point, go to your credit card
company, now, and dispute the charges. By law the credit card company has to
believe you, and won't pay them another cent.

~~~
roel_v
Yeah that's what I thought, too. I'm in the Netherlands though, Land of
Cheese, Clogs and Worst Customer Treatment Ever. Credit card companies cannot
be contacted directly here, cc's are issued through banks, who then do the
customer 'service' for these cards. So I called them and they basically told
me that I could a) cancel my whole card, which would mean that I would have to
change all subscriptions etc. that use this card; or b) file a complaint, but
the lady at the customer service desk basically told me I wouldn't stand much
of a chance 'because it's a subscription'. This doesn't make sense of course
so I'm going to file it anyway - this is all on a card in someone else's name
though (company card) and only the person whose name is on the card can make a
complaint. So now I have to get my boss to call, wait for god knows how long
to actually get someone on the phone, and all for getting a freaking cc
dispute. Ugh.

~~~
jeroen
Not entirely true. I have a card straight from Amex. Fortunately I can't tell
you if that makes things better.

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jwcacces
2 months, seriously?

Ignore Yale's process, go to the computer store that night get a new hard
drive and swap it out. 500GB laptop hard drives cost approximately $60. What
was the cost of not having your computer for 2 months?

Also, here's another case of don't outsource your bread and butter. You have
no control over what Mosy does with your data, and you're relying on trust
alone that it will be there when you need it. Why would you think that a
company you aren't paying will treat you as well as you'd treat yourself?

If you want someone to be mad at, be mad at yourself for being a dumb
consumer.

~~~
barrkel
I have no idea what it's like at Yale, but I have known people in colleges in
Ireland who are not allowed to do any maintenance on their own machines for IT
union reasons.

~~~
makmanalp
What sort of union is this?

~~~
barrkel
A workers union to which the IT department workers belonged, but the lecturers
didn't. I don't know the particulars.

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riobard
TL;DR: He used free Mozy backup account. Hard drive failed. Replacement took 2
months. He never tried to recover the file within 2 months. Mozy's policy is
to delete data of free accounts if no activity for 30 days. Data deleted. He
went mad.

Does this mean “cloud” fails? Hell no……

~~~
MichaelGG
At least they could have emailed him a few days beforehand saying "Hey, you
haven't used our service for 4 weeks. We're about to delete the data!"

~~~
mbreese
This was a customer service fail, in that they didn't notify him. But this
isn't a cloud or enterprise EMC fail at all. I think blaming all of EMC for
this is a little over the top.

~~~
geuis
He wasn't a customer. He was using a free service. Unless you're paying
someone money, you're not a customer. If you live next to a coffee shop and
use their wifi without ever buying coffee, do you expect the shop to help you
reconnect if their internet goes down?

So no, it has nothing to do with customer service. Its someone who A) was
using a free service and B) never bothered logging in to make sure his data
was still being hosted by said free service.

~~~
Klinky
Even free service customers are still "customers". Mozy could have even spun
this warning e-mail off as a promo for their Pro service. Send out an e-mail
saying "Warning, your data will be deleted in x days", then the body can say
something like "Mozy Free customers need login at least once every 30 days to
keep their account active. Please click the link below and login to let us
know you're still using our service. If you do not respond your data will be
deleted.

You can remove this restriction by upgrading to Mozy Pro, for only
$9.95/month."

Wham. Informs the customers, let's them fix their problem & gives them an
alternative if they don't want to do this every 30 days.

Instead they elected to delete his data w/o giving a warning besides something
deep in their ToS. There was a failure with him getting back into his account.
When he finally got in and found out his data was gone, they basically sent
him canned responses from customer service reps who obviously don't have the
power to help customers. The only thing that saved his data was being able to
write a angry blog post which caught the attention of Mozy PR. Surprise!
Surprise! The data actually wasn't deleted after all.

Needless to say, if they really didn't have the data, then that would make
them seem better in my eyes. The fact that they did have the data, but their
customer service rep didn't have the power or the training to find it - or
maybe he did but was not allowed to divulge it to a non-paying customer just
reeks of mismanagement.

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masnick
I'm surprised that a computer science professor didn't have a better method
for backups.

It seems common sense to me that you should have at a very minimum:

\- Continuous onsite backup onto a different physical device (e.g. Time
Machine on ext. HDD)

\- Weekly or monthly backups onto a different physical device kept offsite
(e.g. ext. HDD in a safe deposit box)

\- Continuous cloud-based backup (e.g. Backblaze, Mozy, etc.)

I personally use Backblaze as a last resort, in case my laptop HDD fails _and_
something happens to my Time Machine backups. The probability of this is so
low, if it happens I'll be happy to pay $200 for them to send me a hard drive.

Also, IMHO it seems ridiculous to me to expect restoring tens of GB over HTTP
to work flawlessly. One of the reasons I chose Backblaze is that they have the
ability to physically send me my data. Web restore is for the files you can't
live without until the package from Backblaze arrives.

(formatting edits)

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StavrosK
From the non-delivery of the "forgotten password" emails, I assume that you
weren't checking the email you registered with any more (maybe it was an old
one you no longer used)? However, I don't see this as Mozy's fault. They
provide you with online backup for free and all they ask is that you regularly
check in to show that you're still using the service.

Providing services costs money, and it's entirely acceptable for the provider
to terminate non-paying users' services at any time. Of course, it's much
better if they do it after a while and with a warning (which Mozy apparently
did do), but it's unfortunate that the email was lost.

In summary, I don't think people have much right to complain that the service
they were getting for free wasn't provided in perpetuity as well. If you
wanted reliable service, I think the 5 GBP/mo isn't too much to pay to ensure
that your files are safe.

~~~
bwhite
It's also possible that Mozy's "forgotten password" function "succeeds"
without showing any error messages to the user if the user has been removed.

~~~
StavrosK
From the post it seems that the user has their data deleted but the account
remains (as he was able to log in still), but that is a possibility.

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Osiris
I've been using Hybir Backup for online + offline backup, which I found out
about on HN. The application can backup to multiple locations, including their
online service. So I have a local ioMega NAS plus the online backup service.
They keep your data as long as you pay.

Plus, Hybir does an image backup so you can use a boot CD to restore your HDD
to the exact state it was in at the time of the backup. They de-dupe across
all their clients so for online backup you only have to upload a small percent
of your total data as much if (like Windows 7 files) will already be in their
repository.

I certainly feel a lot better about having BOTH an online backup and a local
offline backup. I believe CrashPlan offers the same option, but without the
image-style backup/restore.

~~~
barrkel
CrashPlan does better cross-OS support; Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris,
including, with moderate hacking, Nexenta. This works out well for my Nexenta
NAS, which uses ZFS for multi-terabyte local storage. My home PCs can back up
to both the NAS and the cloud, for redundancy and speed of restore.

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arethuza
I'm slightly surprised that Yale University doesn't have a standard mechanism
for backing up employee laptops!

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kleinsch
This does showcase an issue I've come across before: if there's a service
that's important to you, make sure they have an email address on file that you
check regularly. You never realize until it's too late that they've sent you
"URGENT: WE'RE GOING TO SHUT DOWN YOUR ACCOUNT" five times at the spam-catcher
account you never check.

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bayareaguy
I don't trust this guy, especially given his connections to EMC's competitors.

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harold
I would have a hard time going 2 days without a computer, let alone 2 months.

~~~
throwawayadvice
I agree, most of my business and personal life (sadly) revolves around access
to my computer and pertinent data.

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earl
Mozy is a piece of shit. I'm forced to run it on my laptop by corporate
policy. My very favorite bit is how it pegs my hard disk for _fifteen fucking
minutes_ to backup a single 0 byte file. What those retards are doing in the
meantime, no one knows.

~~~
radioactive21
Any good alternatives? I am nterested in cloud storage for backup.

~~~
soult
One word: Backblaze!

~~~
joanou
Another word: AltDrive.com - Free two month trial.

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mkramlich
Freeloader demands what he thought he paid for, dammit!

oh wait

