Following up on my post from a week or so ago that described how cloud backups of started failing.

From the email that they sent last night:

…during a recent planned maintenance window, a redundant array of servers containing critical metadata was decommissioned prematurely. As a result, some metadata was compromised, and critical links between the storage environment and our DRaaS cloud (Cloud Services) were disconnected. Engineers could not re-establish the required links between the metadata and the storage system, rendering the data unusable. This means partners cannot replicate or failover machines in our datacenter.

Continuing… As we work to remedy the situation, our primary goal is to minimize exposure and ensure, if needed, you can recover client data. It is recommended you create an additional offsite backup as soon as possible while during the re-seeding process.

A rep from Arcserve just called. He started into a spiel about the status, but I politely cut him off since I’ve been reading the propaganda that the company has been sending out. I asked several pointed questions:

Q: The automatic reseed process appears to have started automatically. How long will that process take?

A: Anywhere from weeks to several months. We really don’t know.

Q: What is the status of backups that we have stored in StorageCraft’s cloud (which go back a year or more).

A: All backups in cloud storage are permanently lost. We had hoped to find a way to recover that data, but those efforts stopped when it became clear that recovery would not be possible.

Q: What efforts are being made to compensate MSPs for the failure here?

A: We won’t be billing for the time that the backups were not working.

Q: That’s it?

A: We are putting together a list of partners who are asking for additional compensation. I will put your name on that list.

So there you have it folks, they totally screwed the pooch here and besides a mea culpa they are “generously” not charging for the time that cloud backups aren’t working. No immediate plans to compensate for the huge amount of data that we’ve been paying every month for them to store.

Class action lawsuits will be coming soon, I hope. Anyone with connections in that arena, please step up.