Jungledisk has been down since Saturday - Mosso Cloud Files Fail | Hacker News Reader

Jungledisk has been down since Saturday - Mosso Cloud Files Fail

forum.jungledisk.com

22 pointspmikal13 comments

"We’ve been working continuously throughout the weekend with the Cloud Files team to help ease the capacity constraints we previously discussed and restore full access to to Jungle Disk users of Cloud Files. Through our investigation we’ve determined that a significant cause of the problem was a bug in Jungle Disk 2.60a that prevented the directory cache system from working properly and resulted in an excessive load on the Cloud Files system even under normal operation. We have corrected the error and Jungle Disk 2.60c is now available for download."

Sounds like it was a Jungledisk problem, not a Mosso problem.

You need to back up to two or three services, all run by different organizations. Disk redundancy buys you little -- you need organizational redundancy. The chance of any particular service failing for business or technical reasons is much higher than the risk of disk failures.

Personally, I back Anybots up to:

   - a 3 TB ReadyNAS in the building (everything nightly)

   - rsync.net (important stuff nightly)

   - dropbox (important stuff instantly)

   - USB drives I keep at home (mostly everything monthly)

Wow, this is most definitely quite an embarrassment for JungleDisk, transparency is nice, but doesn't offer much solace to those needing their files. Incidents like these are all one needs to convince themselves that switching to the cloud isn't reliable. Hopefully they'll be able to resolve the issue soon and save face.

Just like having one backup anywhere, it's not a reliable setup. Using multiple backups is always better, and frankly, easy. Just backup to JD and a few other services or even locally and you're good to go.

Personally, I'm working on setting up a local backup and backing that up to the cloud.

I set this up to backup my Macbook. I setup a RAID 1 mirror on two external USB drives on a Mac Mini, shared the drive, and I back up to it as a time capsule using this trick: http://www.readynas.com/?p=253 Then I ran a nightly backup of that volume to Jungledisk. It was very emotionally satisfying.

Unfortunately my up tube is too small, and the data won't fit. The initial 100GB upload was gonna take 40 days, so I stopped it after 10 with slow internets.

If you have the tubes, I do recommend it though. Its a really solid backup setup.

I was going to build a service based on cloudfiles over the weekend, but it was pretty much unusable, because I got timeouts all the time.

It was certainly disconcerting to see the failure of a component that was supposed to be the core of my infrastructure. Cloudfiles just moved out of beta about a week ago, and for growing pains the outage was pretty long.

According to their status updates, data integrity was never at stake, just availability. CDN files were always accessible.

I'm relieved to see that the Jungle Disk integration seems to be to blame for this, since this hints at a one-time peak load event rather than an overall infrastructure failure.

I think the ease of use of the CDN and low latency of delivery for many small files is a big win. Is anyone else here (thinking of) using them?

I've got little love for Mosso and their offerings. Rackspace as a whole has never done me wrong but I have wasted many hours working with their techs dealing with some of their server problems on Mosso (this is for hosting not cloudfiles). I eventually had to ask for my money back which they gave me but not before they tried everything in their power to keep me working with them. (Which by that point I considered a waste of time and migrated clients over to SliceHost which later got bought out by Rackspace...)

So while I may be biased - I'd like to point out that a bug in a end user product brought down their entire cloudfiles platform and that the same bug also effected S3 and had no noticeable effect.

Looks like they're working hard to bring it back.

http://status.cloudfiles.mosso.com/

So, at the risk of asking a stupid question, does this mean the tag line on the front page ("Multiple datacenters to ensure high availability") is bunk?

I use S3, but not JD, so I don't keep up with it much. I thought that when they added Mosso, it was in case S3 went down -- am I misunderstanding how it works?

I thought that when they added Mosso, it was in case S3 went down -- am I misunderstanding how it works?

Yes. With Jungle Disk you pick where you want your files stored.

As far as I can tell Jungle Disk added support for Mosso simply because Rackspace bought JD and were embarrassed to not be using their own cloud storage system.

Well, they bought JD because they wanted to market their cloud storage system. Its a powerful tool for gaining non developer users.

Thanks for the clarification.

I think "Multiple datacenters to ensure high availability" describes JungleDisk on S3 only. When I was evaluating CloudFiles, the Mosso chat rep. said that they only had one data center (in Dallas, IIRC).

Even with multiple data centers, things like this can happen if bad data gets replicated to multiple data centers.

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