Of Turkeys, Traffic and Testing: Cloud Computing Lessons from My Hometown

You've got backup systems and power in place. What else could you possibly need? Testing routines -- and maybe cloud-based backups for your backups.

Sometimes, blog posts almost write themselves. As an example, let me quote directly from a front-page story from today's edition of my local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. The headline of the story in the print edition of the paper: "County's 911 system knocked out by turkey."

"A wild turkey that flew into power lines knocked out Sonoma County's high-tech emergency 911 dispatch system Sunday night and crippled operations at the courthouse and county jail Monday.

"The power blackout was compounded when the county's massive and expensive emergency backup power system failed.

"On Monday, with computers out, traffic court was greatly curtailed, court calendars and proceedings had to be recorded by hand and jail inmates missed morning court appearances."

"With the blackout, the [emergency services] dispatchers' computers and every computer connected to the county system went black, officials said. At that point, the county's uninterrupted power supply, or UPS, should have kicked in.

"'The UPS failed,' said Chris Hentz, who supervises tech support for the county's computer dispatch system. 'It's just that simple.'"

The Lesson Here: If your systems are indeed critical, consider renting and configuring some cloud-based computing and communications resources as "warm spare"backups you can activate quickly should your primary systems fail, for whatever reason. (A favorite company of mine, 2600Hz, is doing some interesting things around cloud-based E911 and disaster recovery, for example.) Regular testing of back-up systems, including supposedly "uninterruptible" power supplies, is also a good idea. But you're already doing that. Right?

Amazingly, in another section of the same day's paper, this headline: "Traffic control system crashes." The story, adapted from a March 30 post at the Press Democrat's "Road Warrior" blog, goes on to report that on March 23, both primary and backup servers running the software that coordinates Santa Rosa's traffic signals crashed. "This force signals at major intersections to revert to a dated program that isn't nearly as efficient as the current one," the story added.

"When the server that housed the software program crashed, the backup files were also corrupted, [city traffic engineer Rob] Sprinkle said. So instead of just rebooting the program on a new server, city staff have spent two weeks essentially rebuilding it, he said. He estimated that the fix is 95 percent complete."

The Lesson Here: At the risk of repeating myself (again/still), if you can't or aren't prepared to move a critical application to the cloud, at least put a backup version there. And test both your primary and backup solutions, especially the connections that are supposed to make that cloud-based backup readily available. (How many of you are using a cloud-based backup service such as Carbonite, Google Cloud Storage, iCloud or Mozy to back up your personal or business files? And how often have you tested the file-restoration features of your chosen solution?)

The Bottom Line: Don't be a turkey, wild or otherwise. Add cloud-based backups to your technology toolkits. And trust, but verify. Test everything regularly enough to let you and your colleagues sleep well at night.

Carbonite vs. Mozy: My Real-Life Cloud-Based Backup Experiences

I, like many of you, lived in fear of reaching for my trusty MacBook one day, only to have it not respond or to have lost all of my precious work and personal information and files. So when Mozy started advertising on TV (and I got my wife a new MacBook and she started loading important stuff on it, too), I signed us both up. (I thought Apple’s MobileMe offered features I didn’t want or need, and Mozy was cheaper.)

Why cloud-based backup? Two reasons. One, if I bought an external hard drive and backed all of our data up onto it, the data was still at risk, if something catastrophic struck our home. (This is why I also eschewed Apple’s Time Machine application.) Two, cloud-based backup means that at least in theory, I could recover critical files from almost anything running a Web browser. A nice safety net in case my laptop failed while on the road, thought I.

I was a very happy Mozy user for a good while – the software downloaded and installed with almost no intervention from me, and after the first backup, which took place over several days, everything would be updated invisibly to me and my wife, as Mozy promised. But then, a few weeks ago, stuff just stopped working. And the same software that had been backing up our stuff invisibly was now not doing so, and not telling me anything useful about why it had stopped working.

So I dutifully visited the Mozy online support portal. Or rather, I tried to, but kept getting weird errors referring to Salesforce.com, the cloud-based software Mozy apparently used for customer care and relationship management. To make a long, painful story short, once I finally got into the online support portal, I discovered that Mozy had released a new version of its Windows software, and that both Mac and Windows users were complaining in large numbers and backups that had been working but were no longer.

I posted a note about my problem, and found out that mine was not the same one the other Mac users were having. Wonderful news. I e-mailed Mozy support twice, got automated acknowledgements of my e-mails, then radio silence. Meanwhile, I went without regular backups for days, then weeks.

Finally, I broke down and downloaded the free Carbonite software, which also downloaded and installed with minimal intervention from or confusion for me. And I have to say that Carbonite was even more invisible than Mozy had been during the initial multi-day backup. But I wasn’t really excited about starting all over again with a new vendor. So I visited the Mozy support portal and e-mailed Mozy support again. This time, though, I found the name and e-mail address of Mozy’s press contact and copied him as well as the support address.

Within a day, I got an e-mail from an actual human being, one Brittney Mitchell. With Brttney’s intervention, everything changed, and changed quickly. She apologized for my problems, inspected my log files and determined that my account was misbehaving because I had failed to update an expired credit card. (Why their software wasn’t smart enough to tell me this explicitly from the beginning of my problem is still unclear to me. Brittney said that part of the problem was that I signed up without going through a salesperson, who would have flagged such a thing. I countered that not having to go through a salesperson was one of the reasons I’d signed up in the first place. Sigh.)

Once I updated my credit card information and downloaded the latest Mozy client software, backups started happening again for me and my wife. Meanwhile, Brittney informed me that part of the reason for Mozy’s initial lack of responsiveness was that the company was moving support call handling from India to the US and dealing with a deluge of requests and a lack of trained responders. (Brittney had only been with the company for a month when she took up my issues, she wrote.)

Meanwhile, the Carbonite software was working just fine – but no one ever responded to the e-mail questions I sent to that company. All I got was the automated reminders that my free access was about to expire and that I should subscribe – messages I received after cancelling my trial account. Sigh.

The bottom line: I’d have to recommend Mozy over Carbonite, not because I know of anything particularly lacking in Carbonite, but because Mozy finally came through when I had support questions that needed answers. I also believe that Mozy moving support to the US should improve things for all users, not just me or those using Mozy for the Mac. (I don’t know where Carbonite user support is based, because I’ve never received a personal response from them.) Also, Mozy is owned by EMC, a company that knows a bit about backup, at least from the enterprise perspective.

Carbonite make have a slight edge over Mozy because Carbonite offers an app with the ability to restore individual files on demand to an iPad, an iPhone or a Wi-Fi-equipped iPod touch, but I don’t expect Mozy to allow this gap to exist for long. Ultimately, the Mozy-vs.-Carbonite discussion may come down to distinctions that make little difference. But to me, either is far better than no cloud-based backup at all. But what do YOU think?