
I am Bruce Goldensteinberg, the person who brought Carbonite’s unethical activities to NY Times Tech Columnist David Pogue.

The Dell RAID servers have been flawless and we’re extremely happy with them. So far, Promise has refused to accept responsibility for their equipment’s failures, so now we are suing them to get our money back. This configuration is in theory 36 million times more reliable than a single disk drive - the chances of 3 out of 15 drives failing at the same time are almost nil.
#Carbonite support windows 10 full#
We took full responsibility for what happened and I did my best to call each of these customers personally to apologize.Īs a result of our problems with the Promise servers, we switched to a popular Dell server that uses RAID6 – an improved RAID that allows for the loss of 3 of the 15 drives simultaneously before you lose any data. Most of the 54 got some or most of their data back. Since they weren’t completely backed up when their PCs crashed, these customers were unable to restore all of their files from Carbonite. Statistically, about 2 out of every 1,000 consumer hard drives will crash every week, so 54 of these customers had their PCs crash before their re-started backups were complete. Carbonite automatically restarted all 7,500 backups and more than 99% of these were completely restored without incident. In this case, we believe that the firmware on the servers had bugs that caused the servers to crash.
#Carbonite support windows 10 software#
The RAID software that makes all this work is embedded as “firmware” in the storage servers. Here is what happened: The Promise servers that we were purchasing in 20 use RAID technology to spread data redundantly across 15 disk drives so that if any one disk drive fails, you don’t lose any data. But we do want to point out that this has not happened in a long time and is not an ongoing problem.Ģ) The total number of Carbonite customers who were unable to retrieve their data was 54, not 7,500. We do not say this to minimize the matter. I would like to make sure that your readers understand two points with regard to Carbonite’s lawsuit against Promise Technologies:ġ) This event happened over a year ago. If you can’t do it right, get rich trying. Figure out who you’re going to sue – because hey, work is hard.If you’re backing up straight to tape and you’ve only got one tape jukebox in-house, that’s a risk. Find your single points of failure – if you’re relying on a single cloud vendor for all of your data protection, that’s a risk.These two failures are a 1-2 punch to the jaw of your career.


Restore a different server every day onto the same target testbed box. Automate your backup testing – build a set of T-SQL scripts to automatically restore your production databases onto another server.For the love of your own job, never mind your company’s revenue stream, take some time this week to: Who knew they were referring to their own services?ĭon’t point and laugh and say it could never happen to you because you do your own backups in-house, because I’ve seen too many backup strategies fail for too many reasons. Bogus equipment? You mean, like hard drives that fail? That’s horrible! Who could expect something like that? Who could know about the dangers that lurk around every corner? The Statistics are Staggering AlrightĬarbonite’s web site warns, “You need to be aware that losing your most valuable files is a very real possibility. They’re suing Promise Technology, makers of popular storage gear, for selling them bogus equipment. TechCrunch reports that Carbonite, an online backup company, lost customer data.īut wait, this is different: it’s not their fault.
