Why I no longer trust EMC | Hacker News Reader

Why I no longer trust EMC

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70 pointsthekguy36 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What sort of union is this?

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

Yeah, we have that too, they call it stealing work. But it has to do with unions and exclusivity deals they work out with companies.

I worked for a company that only union members from facilities were allowed to rearrange your office. So moving a file cabinet was impossible. You couldn't do it without stealing work, and there was no way your department would pay to have something like that done for you. The same went for changing the height of your height adjustable desk, getting a whiteboard screwed on the wall (instead of leaning against the wall while sitting on the desk) or even moving your computer from one side of the desk to the other.

Sometimes you just had to do it anyway and hope the union guy who empties your trash doesn't notice.

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……

More like it means read your TOS closer, and don't get mad when data from your FREE account is deleted in accordance with their policy.

"He never tried to recover the file within 2 months"

If my hard drive failed I'd be recovering the data back somewhere, anywhere (e.g. a VPS), within hours.

He mentions in a comment that he was using their web interface to access individual files while his laptop was out. Also, the free plan was limited to 2GB. Given that he isn't exactly screaming about it, I think that this was either not his most important data, or not his primary backup recourse.

I sympathize, because in the last 10 years I've probably "OKed" over 100,000 pages of TOS, and not read a single one.

The fact that all his files were gone and he didn't know it means one of two things: either they are disorganized, or pretty fucking nonchalant about wiping user data. Either is unacceptable in a backup company.

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!"

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.

If your backup provider elects to delete your data due to an obscure ToS clause then it is their fault for sure. The article does not say anything new about cloud providers - you have to trust their competence. But this is a critical failure by EMC / Mozy and is nobody's fault but theirs.

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.

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.

His argument, though, isn't about the core technology or the viability of the 'cloud', it's about trust. He makes clear in the beginning that the primary reason he chose EMC was because he trusted them not to lose or do something stupid with his data - and they did just that.

A Customer Service fail, in this case, is identical to a technical fail - his data is Gone, Gone, Gone, and all he's got for it is platitudes.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

One word: Backblaze!

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

I've switched to using Arq for my backups. It's not a service like Mozy/Backblaze, you purchase the Arq client (30 bucks) and then it backs up to your own S3 account.

The fact it is not a service has lots of positive benefits for me:

The company can die and I can still recover my files (there's an open source recovery tool on github - https://github.com/sreitshamer/arq_restore

It also does away with some of the stupid restrictions typically found with Backblaze/Mozy with respect to backing up network drives.

Incremental backups are lightning fast.

It keeps a "Time Capsule" style incremented history of your recently changed files.

Freeloader demands what he thought he paid for, dammit!

oh wait

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