Great things happening this week at the ‘Drive. We kicked off our ElephantDrive.EDU initiative with our first partner, Harvard Student Agencies.  We here at ElephantDrive (especially our resident “Harvard Mouth”, CEO Michael Fisher) are thrilled to bring our versatile and simple protection and access platform to the next generation of leaders.  Today’s college students are finding the majority of their class work being performed collaboratively and more often than not, stored on vulnerable laptops.

In the face of declining capital investments and slowing enrollment, educational institutions from K-12 schools to colleges and universities are looking for services (especially data protection solutions) that are easy, dependable, and economical.  For the largest student-run corporation in the world, the turn to cloud services was natural.  “We’ve been looking to add online backup to our menu of services for a while now,” said Austin Chu, Manager of the Harvard Student Agencies DormStore, “and once we found the ElephantDrive solution it was an easy decision.”

We intend to continue to develop features and functionality with the needs of students, faculty, and staff in mind.

Thanks again to all of you for your patience during a protracted maintenance period this week. Many of you expressed concern regarding the service availability and I am happy to report that we have completed the upgrade and that the platform should be performing faster than ever.

Important note: no data was lost during this time; but no new backups were taken.

In the future we intend to proactively notify our users via this blog and email when these events are coming.

Thanks again for being a part of the Herd. As always, we welcome your comments.

NOTICE: During our scheduled maintenance on 7/19/2009, a configuration error was made. While none of your data is at risk, the error requires that we bring down the ElephantDrive service yet again to correct it.

Site and services should be back online before midnight PST.

Thanks again for your patience.

Team ElephantDrive

Herd,

Thanks as always for your patience with our engineers.  We were able to perform our system upgrades and bring back our US West facilities, although it took a little longer than we had hoped.

Keep backing up and we’ll be posting again soon!

Team ElephantDrive

Herd,

In our ongoing effort to provide you with the premium online storage offering on the web, today we are performing routine maintenance on our infrastructure. This will cause the US West facility to have intermittent periods of nonavailability.

As always, please contact us at support@elephantdrive.com with any questions.

Team ElephantDrive

We’ve been pretty busy here at the ElephantDrive factory. Immediately following the launch of ReadyNAS Vault powered by ElephantDrive, we’ve been expanding and upgrading our infrastructure and this week released version 4.0.2 of ElephantDesktop.

We’ve spent a long time talking to many of you about what users want and need out of this platform, spent late nights debating at the whiteboards, and countless hours developing and testing… The latest release includes a number of major bug fixes and feature upgrades, including more intelligent client-side differentiation, a more inituitive UI, and a more local resource friendly agent.

Our goal is to strike a balance between the fastest performance hashing, encrypting, and transferring your files with a client platform that is respectful of its utilization of your available connectivity, CPU, and memory.

Give it a spin and let us know what you think.

In accordance with ElephantDrive company policy, we are notifying our users of the following:

This morning at around 10 AM PST, an edge router configuration error at our west coast datacenter caused a full shutdown of access to that facility. No data was lost during this period of time, but users from the western United States and Asia-PAC were unable to upload new data.

The configuration error was corrected at approximately 11:30 AM PST. Please feel free to comment here or contact support@elephantdrive.com if you require further information or assistance.

Early this morning, HP rather suddenly notified users of the impending shutdown of its online backup offering, Upline.  While we don’t revel in the failure of a fellow service provider, we do want to make sure that displaced users know that are great options to keep their data protected in the cloud. Sign up now, and receive unlimited storage for up to 4 devices for one year for $49.95, a 50% discount from the list price.  Clicking on the link above will automatically apply the discount, no promotional code is necessary!

Additional Upline coverage here, here, and here.

We are looking for consumers and businesses that are willing to share their experiences with data loss and protection with ElephantDrive.  Every user story that gets published will receive a free ElephantDrive T-Shirt and the best story will receive a brand new 16 GB iPod Touch.

Please email all submissions to userstories@elephantdrive.com and make sure to include the following:

Describe an incident in which you lost critical data:

1. Was it the result of hardware failure?  Theft?  User error?  Fire, flood, or other natural disaster?
2. Was it personal or business related?

Describe your experience with ElephantDrive:

1. What do you use ElephantDrive for?
2. How does ElephantDrive help you?  What problem does it solve?
3. What is your favorite thing about ElephantDrive?  What is your least favorite thing about ElephantDrive?  If you could add feature(s), what would they be?
4. Any other comments / stories / suggestions?

In our ongoing effort to provide you with the most reliable and high performance storage platform on the web, we will be performing system upgrades tonight starting at around 10 PM PST.  Maintenance should last no longer than an hour.

During this time there will be periods where connectivity is down (this should be a short time) and we will be adding additonal servers to support your file indexes (this may take a little longer).  The latter period will allow you to connect to the service, but no new backups will be performed.

What are we doing?  As mentioned above, we’re adding some more iron into our internally managed datacenter to augment the great performance we get from our integration with Amazon Web Services.  Additionally, we’re adding more bandwidth capacity from Tier 1 providers so you should recognize speed at an all time high after our work is complete.

I’ll be keeping the blog updated, so check back here if you have comments or concerns or, as always, just shoot us an email at support@elephantdrive.com.