Alert: Systems handled Amazon S3 outage seamlessly

ElephantDrive has been one of Amazon S3’s most prolific consumers since the AWS launched the service. While we make extensive use of S3, our systems are not completely reliant on their performance. We’ve architected a solution that keeps some storage on S3 and some on ElephantDrive’s own storage devices, so that in the event of an outage or problem by either we can continue to provide uninterrupted service.

This was put to the test again this weekend when the S3 service experienced a major outage. Details of the downtime were covered by a variety of sources, some of which detailed responses from end users. The good news is that our system worked flawlessly - our storage allocation engine recognizes the problem and routed requests to available nodes instead of the non-responsive S3 service points.

We’d like to thank our engineers for staying on top of things and the many users who wrote to us about the S3 issues. We appreciate your support and concern - happily our safeguards worked as planned and we avoided any problems.

No ElephantData was lost during this experience and no requests were denied as a result of the problems. We will continue to work with our friends at Amazon Web Services to help them improve their systems, as well as continue to review the other services available.

The Team at ElephantDrive

External Hard Drives = Pain + Suffering

Hello Digital World (aka anyone on the planet who has ever downloaded a song, composed a word document, or uploaded a picture on a computer machine)

Just the other day my Apple Powerbook G4 Laptop reached its 74GB capacity and needless to say I was certainly shocked and awed.  I decided it was time to purchase a small external hard drive to transfer some files and free up some space on my machine.  I strolled across the street to the newly opened Staples store where i was greeted by pleasant staff who really didn’t know much about digital technology.  I bought a 160GB Western Digital external hard drive, raced home to my apartment, plugged it in and nothing happened….I tried rebooting, changing USB ports, calling the technical support, but nothing worked.

Angered and upset, i trudged back over to Staples to tell them of my troubles.  I was even smart enough to bring my laptop to the store to prove to them the problem.  After insisting that the device should work, a Staples employee finally gave in and recommended I try at Maxtor hard drive.  So i took it home, it didn’t work, and smoke blew out of both ears.  I went back to Staples, kindly asked for a refund, and decided that external hard drives were not for me.  As we speak my data is being backed up by Elephantdrive, and I hardly miss the kind people at Staples.

Moral of the story: more wires + more devices + more things that can break = anger/frustration

                               my data + Elephantdrive + easy to follow instructions = joy/happiness/peace of mind

Sincerely,

AF86

UPDATED POST: Offer disappointed users an online backup, storage, and access alternative - ElephantDrive

Sorry for any confusion - this post is part of an effort to see if we can convince the operators of the Linkup to help us build a migration tool. Unfortunately, we don’t have any tools built yet, so for now we’ll just wait to see if we can get in touch with them.

As many observers of the online storage world are aware, The Linkup is winding down and its users will need to find a new home for their data. The Linkup was the latest consumer-facing incarnation of an online storage firm that has had many names (Streamload, MediaMax, The Linkup), and appears also split off a sister company focused on the enterprise called Nirvanix. The is some debate over how the two are connected, covered exhaustively and interestingly by TechCrunch.

In any event, we are not interested in the problems of the past - we just want to help users who are interested in online backup, storage, and access find a great long term solution. As it happens, there are a number of users of the The Linkup who have a limited time to retrieve their files. We would like to offer our service as a solution, and if possible allow the direct transfer of files from The Linkup to ElephantDrive. We’ve actually had several requests already to do just that, and made an overture to The Linkup team as such.

If you have any information on who we can contact to facilitate this transition, please let us know. There doesn’t appear to be any additional API documentation, but we would love to offer an application that will enable cloud-to-cloud transfer. If you are familiar with their API and con provide any feedback (is the API still open?), we are all ears.

If you are a former (or about to be former) user of The Linkup or one of its predecessors, we would still love to provide you with simple, secure, and affordable online storage.

BOSS - launched by Yahoo is a neat idea…

Former Yahoo wizard Jeremy Zawodny offered his congratulations today to Yahoo for launching BOSS (aka Built your Own Search Service).

This is very exciting news. Obviously this is a very tenuous analogy, but I’m sort of reminded of MSFT/Apple strategy lines by this move.

Google (a la Apple) has a better product but (as far as tinkering with search by outsiders goes) it is hermetically sealed. Yahoo (a la MSFT) is going to try to leverage the rest of the world’s developers to expand its reach, potentially building their own set of “productivity search engines” that are the best examples of this (a la MS Office).

I look forward to people destroying this analogy.

Other coverage at ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick explores this (BOSS, not the MSFT/Apple analogy) further.

Why is this on the ElephantDrive blog? We always thought that BOSS would be a good acronym for “best online storage service” so we noticed but we were sort of sad to see it co-opted for this…

ElephantDrive usage stats on Wakoopa

Some savvy programmers in Amsterdam have a web service called Wakoopa that provides a personal dashboard view of the programs you use. We noticed it and like to see that they’re tracking the ElephantDrive among many others.

We’re blogging about it because a) it’s kind of cool and b) it presents some interesting questions about usage. Their definition of usage really focuses on applications that you are actively engaged with, so that even though you might be running ElephantDrive online backup all the time in the background, it might not register as much in their time calculation.

Check it out - you might learn something about what’s running on your system.

Lenovo ThinkPads to include online backup? Lessons from HP…

It sounds like Lenovo is going to bundle online backup with some of there newer ThinkPad models. It is good news for the industry as more end users will be aware of the importance and value of the online solutions. That said, it really has to work well.

HP bought a company and launched its Upline online backup and storage service to much fanfare. Unfortunately, the service fell flat on its face and was taken down pretty much immediately and the guys at BackupReview.info panned it.

ElephantDrive users now include many former customers of other services. We’ll see how Lenovo’s product goes and whether or not it can provide the best online backup, storage, and access.

Interview posted at BackupReview.info

The team at BackupReview.info, one of the authorities in the realm of online data protection, conducted an interview with our CEO, Michael Fisher. Questions ranged from how ElephantDrive got started to geographic distribution of the user base. For the full story and a lot of answers about online backup and storage, check out their site for the ElephantDrive interview.

Mac users: interesting announcement coming later this week…

Maintenance Complete - Performance at all time high…

Just a quick update - the maintenance scheduled for 6/7/8 (cool data, huh?) is now complete and the web site and service are now available again for all end users.

This upgrade streamlined our system so that we can continue to offer the fastest service available, even as we grow to accommodate more online backup, storage, and access demand than ever before.

As always, we are eager for your comments and feedback…

Thanks,

The Team at ElephantDrive

Maintenance alert - Some optimizations being deployed…

Hi ElephantDrive Nation,

Today we are performing some maintenance and optimization on our systems and the ElephantDrive service will be temporarily unavailable. We appreciate your patience during this period and are excited to share the enhanced performance that our platform will be able to provide once complete.

Thanks again,

The Team at ElephantDrive

New features and flow at the ElephantDrive web site

During the last few days we’ve made some substantial changes to the ElephantDrive web site. If you’re familiar with our service, you’ll see that we’ve added some new features like rolling testimonials and press clippings. Additionally, we’ve devoted more real estate to our different account types so that visitors can more quickly identify the ideal plan for their needs.

We are looking for feedback, so if you’ve got any ideas on how we can improve the experience please let us know.

Also, if you would like to submit your own testimonial we would love to add your story to the rotation.

Thanks,
The Team at ElephantDrive