The Real Story Behind The Carbonite Data Loss

Carbonite FailI was catching up on a bunch of RSS feeds this evening and caught this article from MSPMentor. The gist of the story was that Carbonite, a online backup service focused on home and small business users, had lost 7500 clients data in a catastrophic RAID failure.

Then I went and checked out Carbonite's blog, and saw this post by Carbonite CEO David Friend.

Carbonite is suing a vendor over some equipment that we bought back in 2006 and 2007 (see posts below). From a news standpoint, we thought that this was an inconsequential story about a minor trade dispute. Wrong. It has turned into a PR fiasco for Carbonite, and highlights the danger of Internet "news" where every writer is just copying what he or she has read elsewhere and NOBODY is doing what a real reporter does: check the primary sources.

Hundreds of blogs sensationalized our lawsuit by implying that 7500 Carbonite customers had lost data (the real number was 54) and that it is a current ongoing problem (it was over a year ago and we no longer buy servers from Promise).

Throughout all of this, NOT ONE person bothered to pick up the phone and call me to get the facts. Few if any read what was actually in the lawsuit. The story simply passed from one blogger to another, getting juicier along the way.

He has a point, no one checked with Carbonite on just exactly how much data was lost. But I don't think that is the real story here. From what I am inferring from David' post, the loss of a single server is what caused this loss of data. It also comes across in his post that he seems to think of data being on RAID as a backup, something that any decent system engineer will tell you is NOT the case. RAID protects you from losing data if a drive fails, but not if a RAID controller goes bad, or a software error writes over your data.

This whole situation just reeks of an incredibly awful infrastructure. If Carbonite was truly looking out for its customers, it would have that data duplicated to multiple servers, preferably in multiple data centers! For a company touting themselves as backup experts, this is incredibly embarassing.

I want to be careful here, but something doesn't add up according to the TechCrunch article about this mess...

(David) Friend checked in again to state that no data was lost in the event, but a commentor says otherwise (anyone else affected who would like to weigh in?

...and what David says in his own post.

Hundreds of blogs sensationalized our lawsuit by implying that 7500 Carbonite customers had lost data (the real number was 54)

Either Robin from TechCrunch misquoted/understood David, or he lied to Robin.

This also coming from a company that,according to David Pogue (a real journalist!!), had employees write articles on Amazon without stating that they were Carbonite employees.

My personal opinion? Stay far far away from Carbonite. Check out Mozy or JungleDisk instead.