Boston-based Carbonite, a company that backs up customers' PC and Mac hard drives onto its own remote storage systems, has disputed a Boston Globe report that says it lost the backups of more than 7,500 customers.
The report relates to several separate incidents in 2007 that Carbonite claims were caused by defective hardware. Carbonite is now suing both the manufacturer and the company that sold the hardware involved, but takes issue with a Boston Globe article that says the company "lost the backups of over 7,500 customers in a number of separate incidents."
In a statement emailed to the Standard by Carbonite's publicist, Carbonite CEO David Friend says the 7,500 figure is misleading:
On March 21, The Boston Globe reported that Carbonite is suing one of its vendors for defective hardware that was purchased in 2007. This lawsuit stems from an incident that occurred nearly two years ago. The article (and subsequent coverage by other outlets) references court documents which say that Carbonite “lost the backups of over 7,500 customers.” It is possible that readers will walk away from this with the impression that 7,500 customers were unable to restore their files from Carbonite. This is not the case. Let me explain.
All of the affected customers had their backups re-started immediately and automatically. A small number of these customers had their PCs crash before their re-started backups were complete. These customers were unable to restore all off their files from Carbonite. We took full responsibility for what happened, and I did my best to apologize personally to each of these customers.
We addressed the technical issues that caused the above problems, and in the nearly two years since the incident, we have not encountered further problems. That said, our lawsuit seeks a refund for the defective products we were sold.
If that's true, I have to ask: Why file a lawsuit now? IT reporters and bloggers love to write about lawsuits, even more than they do about service outages. It's quite possible Carbonite has drawn more attention to a relatively small data loss two years ago than did the original incidents.
Since launching its online backup service in May 2006, Carbonite claims to have restored more than 160 million lost files for customers in at over 100 countries. The influential Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch dubbed Carbonite "the closest to perfection we've seen so far." Friend claimed a year ago in a comment on ZDNet that the company had "several hundred thousand" users.
Comments
I completely understand where Carbonite is coming from. We also had problems with Promose RAID systems. They failed on multiple occassions and the Promise support people led us to believe that we were the only ones having problems. It didn't take long for us to determine that this Promise storage equipment was unreliable and we switched to HP SAN Storage systems that are absolutely reliable.
One big difference in our problems is that all of our data is replicated to multiple storage systems, so when the Promise RAID systems failed, we didn't lose any data. Even though the HP Systems that we use now are very reliable and redundant, we always maintain multiple levels of redunancy so that we can recover from any hardware failure, including an entire SAN Storage system failing.
Carbonite is much bigger than we are and they have a lot more volume to deal with. We don't offer the dirt cheap plans that they do either. We offer professional online data backup services to business and home office users who expect to be able to recover their data from us whenever they need to, so we make our job to make sure we protect them against technology problems. If you are looking for a smaller online backup service that caters to professional and business needs, then please check us out. We are more focussed on providing reliable service than gaining a massive customer base.
www.rhinoback.com
Thats very interesting thanks for hearing it, in my experience Carbonite has been pretty good so its surprising, I found an interesting article related to Carbonite and Mozy and which one is better, its worthy of a look!
Post new comment