March 11th, 2008
Failed Carbonite upgrade lets customers down
I subscribe to Carbonite’s backup service. Over the last couple of days, the teensy Carbonite icon in my system tray has been red, displaying a message that Carbonite’s servers are unavailable. Today, I sent email to tech support, only to be informed that someone would get back to me “within 72 hours.” That pretty much sucks when I’m paying for a high-availability service. If my hard drive crashes and I need assistance with restore, hopefully I won’t need my data within 72 hours.
Anyhow, I just received an email from Carbonite, describing a server upgrade problem:
Dear Michael,
Carbonite began the first phase of a system upgrade early Monday morning. Due to a server glitch, a number of customers using Carbonite version 3.5.89 have been unable to reconnect since that time, even though Carbonite’s servers were unavailable for only a few hours.
We’ve identified your computer [computer name] as one of those affected.
Don’t worry, your backup is safe, but it will not be updated until you reinstall the latest version of Carbonite as follows:
1) Go to http://www.carbonite.com/manage to log in to your account
2) Click the ‘My Protected Computers’ tab
3) Click the ‘Reinstall’ button, and follow the instructions to reinstall Carbonite on your computerAs soon as you’ve reinstalled, your backup will resume immediately from where it left off.
We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Sincerely,
The Carbonite Team
Looks like someone had a little testing problem over there with the upgrade. The email says “a number of customers” were affected. I wonder if that means all their customers.
Seems there’s never enough time to test before deployment but plenty of time to fix problems after they hit customers. <Blogger shakes head in wonderment and moves on.>
Michael Krigsman is CEO of Asuret, Inc., a software and consulting company dedicated to reducing software implementation failures. Click here to discuss this post with him on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/11/08
