Hotmail Loses Customer Files 388
Rick Zeman writes "News.com is reporting that Microsoft's Hotmail service has lost customers' files 'due to 'system events.' The particular user cited, of course, has no recourse because of the broad disclaimers companies such as Microsoft hide behind; however, you are getting what you pay for. The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
Oh no! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
Fancy conducting multi-million business deals using hotmail! Im glad im not as big a fool as you!
Re:Oh no! (Score:3, Interesting)
GET BIGGER, LONGER LASTING ... e-mail storage.
Seriously though, if you RTFA, it's just one customer in this case, although the summary implies it was more - presumably because the article states that similar incidents have occurred in the past..
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me fill you in on something.. Tech support will tell you that you are the only person facing a certain problem even if all of their other customers are having the same problem. They will do that as long as they are sure you can't prove otherwise.
I've my ISP say that even though my whole block was down. I've had a cell phone provider (Rogers') say that even though they sold me a phone with a very high return rate. As well as countless other examples.
It's marketing.. they want to make the problem seem smaller thatn it is.
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Funny)
But- I can no longer wear pants, and every time I get excited...I pass out.
(Is there such a thing as anti-viagra?)
Well, you know what they say... (Score:4, Funny)
Events happen.
I didn't want all that spam that had accumulated in my hotmail account anyway.
Re:Well, you know what they say... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't like it? You run what is almost certainly the most spammed mail service in the world and do a better job.
Re:Well, you know what they say... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well, you know what they say... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, you know what they say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, you know what they say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well, you know what they say... (Score:3, Informative)
Because, when you go away, your email address goes away too. My first email address was one at my university. Due to some snafu, my email account was completely deleted. When it was finally reinstated, they issued me a completely different username because I'd changed my major. As a result, there were people and friends who my only point of contact was through that address -- and I have
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well, you know what they say... (Score:3, Interesting)
And what pisses me off, is not all the spam which do reach my inbox, but all the 'real' emails which is put in the 'Junk E-Mail' folder.
"You run what is almost certainly the most spammed mail service in the world and do a better job."
I don't see any relevance here.. What's the difference between one e-mail adress and another one. Or someone running an e-mail servi
Re:Events happen? Events happen? (Score:4, Funny)
Just goes to show you .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Back it up yourself.
Like everything else - if you want it done right, do it yourself!
Seriously, if you're using a service such as Yahoo! or Hotmail for important matters (whether they be family, personal, or business), make sure you make a copy of it somewhere that's in your control
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:5, Funny)
The only way to truely secure your data is to hire a team of tibetan monks to each remember 1/5th of it. THen they can sing it back to you.
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:5, Funny)
Better still, hire half a dozen and RAID them.
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, MEN OF THE CLOTH REAM-- no, I shouldn't say it...
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:3, Informative)
If you can't bear the idea of something being lost, it's YOUR JOB to do what's necessary to save it.
Alexandria Felton logged on to her Hotmail account last month and was shocked to find that all of her saved files were gone.
At stake was years' worth of personal and business correspondence, photos and the itinerary for a recently purchased trip...
Alexandria is a moron. It's a *free* service, you get what you pay for. No backup medium is 100% reliable, but most reasonable people would consider
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Its backed by Microsoft so oviously its secure.
Just remember that most people who use Hotmail are not Geeks and they do beleave the hype.
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:3, Insightful)
poor != moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you get what you pay for, but when something like this happens it doesn't necessarily mean the individual is a moron, it means she can't afford anything else.
Re:poor != moron (Score:5, Interesting)
These are people who needed to do simple stuff like type out a resume, write a two page book report for school, or whatever. I spent the better part of a year trying to persuade IS to put OpenOffice on a couple of unused PCs we had sitting around, and their response was, essentially, "Microsoft rulez! OOo droolz!"
"So are we going to put MS Office on the PCs for the public instead?"
"No, we can't afford the licenses."
I actually took my case all the way up to administration, and they as much as told me "We're a library, not a community center. They're lucky we don't block Hotmail."
Shit, they even locked the floppy drives on the few actual PCs (rather than Winterms) we had available for the public, to keep people from saving anything.
All this from one of the largest, and supposedly best, public library systems in the country.
I ended up writing a little PHP script that'll spit out either a preformatted resume or a simple letter-type html page and let you print them out from a browser. Took me an hour, and that was mostly getting the tables right for the resumes. The patrons, my immediate boss, and all of my co-workers were thrilled, but all I got from administration was a warning that I shouldn't have developed the app on company time.
Fuckers.
Hotmail, Yahoo, et al provide valuable services to people who couldn't otherwise get them.
Yeah, the corporations behind the services are only doing it to make a buck.
Yeah, they're free, and you get what you pay for.
Yeah, anybody who should know better, and could afford better, who does *anything* critical with Hotmail is an idiot.
But for some people, something is better than nothing.
Re:poor != moron (Score:3, Interesting)
A computer is increasingly a requirement if you want to find a job or communicate at a professional level. And in a lot of ways, libraries are community centers - you can often take free classes, get tax advice, there are entertaining things for kids, etc.
Running a resource hungry MS operating system j
Re:poor != moron (Score:3, Insightful)
You know how there's always some old codger who still bitches about getting rid of the card catalog ten years ago? Well those people also get *jobs* at the library. And since they tend to have worked there for awhile, they're in a better position to influence policy.
And *they* are the ones who get scared/annoyed/confused when they have to show somebody how to sign up fo
Re:poor != moron (Score:5, Insightful)
If reliability was an issue, even FREE services can be used to provide a level of redundancy higher than burned media.
Yahoo Mail
Hotmail
123Mail
heck, I think even Marijuana.com offers a free webmail account.
Poor people aren't morons, but they may have to actually deal with their situation instead of demanding that the world do so for them.
When I *was* poor and had to rely on the bus or a crappy unreliable car (for example) I simply had to cope with the potential unreliability of my ride by having backup plans. It was a simple fact of my lack of resources, and a good motivator for me to change my condition.
Backups (Score:3, Informative)
It's a pain in the butt, but for some better than losing any "important" data.
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:3, Insightful)
And even if
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:2)
Funny, I often use my Yahoo! Mail account as a backup resource for small pieces of non-sensitive information. You'd think Microsoft would be maintaining periodic backups of Hotmail data, but what the hey.
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just goes to show you .... (Score:4, Informative)
However, anyone running a business on one of these services is counting on the reliability of delivery, which you might not get if you ran your own domain off a DSL line. Reliability of storage is a totally different matter. Anyone running a medium business off Hotmail accounts deserves what they get. At that point they should get serious and look into at least a server closet with UPS, partial T1, etc.
'system events.' (Score:5, Funny)
Re:'system events.' (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and 2001? isn't your article a bit dated...
And finally This [netcraft.com] Shows that hotmail is currently under IIS5.0. I'm no microsoft troll, but as someone said, they are 'eating their own dog food' on this one.
Why use Hotmail in the first place? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why use Hotmail in the first place? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why use Hotmail in the first place? (Score:3, Insightful)
No need to use those silly webmail systems either.
Re:Why use Hotmail in the first place? (Score:2)
I have a free email account through Juno, that I have had for 8 years. One email account with my dialup access(backup). My dial-up and Juno accounts are what I use for all general access email. I get 20-30 spam messages a day. It's even worse since I forward the dial-up to the juno account.
I have a hidden cable account. This is only used to- from trusted parties. No spam, none. Like I said it's secret.
Then there is work, occasional spam, but mozila mail handles it quite we
Its a consistant address (Score:5, Insightful)
True, you could just get your own domain and be done with it, but for the average Joe that may not fully comprehend the options, its not worth the expense nor the extra troubles..
Re:Its a consistant address (Score:2)
BAsic it redirects your emails to a email address of choice. What I do is give that one out to people I want to stay in contact with and a another address when joining something. That way I can switch ISP's in the future but not lose contacts.
The only problem with the free service is it does put a limit on the maximum number of emails, but so far I have not hit the limit.
Re:Its a consistant address (Score:3, Informative)
But why use Hotmail? There are other, better free mail services out there.
Fastmail.FM [fastmail.fm] is a good one--pretty reliable, and it even has free IMAP access. You have to provide your own SMTP server tho, if you don't want to pay Fastmail.FM for one--but that's ok...I don't know of an ISP that doesn't provide for one, anyway.
Its web-based interface is also pretty sweet--it's very
Re:Why use Hotmail in the first place? (Score:2)
So far yahoo has outlasted 2 (3?)isps, 3 jobs, 2 changes in state of residence and I don't keep anything important there
Vs. Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Backing up IMAP email? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Backing up IMAP email? (Score:5, Informative)
Thunderbird->Tools->Offline & Disk Space->Make the messages in my Inbox available when I am working offline (check).
Then feel free to back up the local files as you please.
Bonus points for saying 'raises an interesting question' rather than 'begs the question'.
Re:Backing up IMAP email? (Score:2)
Well, I've tried IMAP in a few email clients: Mac OS X Mail, Entourage, PowerMail, Thunderbird. All of them seemed to cache the email on a local drive. I'm not sure how much this would help you, though, as when you connect to an empty server they likely flush out that cache with varying degrees of thoroughness.
Good riddance! (Score:3, Insightful)
Honesty (Score:5, Insightful)
Scary? No, that's plain honesty. Which should be respected.
Do you honestly expect your backup provider to cover you in the event of a gamma ray burst in the stellar neighbourhood which vapourizes half the planet within 5 minutes? An extreme example to be sure, but 100% coverage is not realistic, nor is it financially desirable.
I have no respect for any company whose sales staff claim 100% uptime or 100% reliable coverage.
Re:Honesty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Honesty (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting example
The first thing I thought of was what happens when some idiot at the client company shuts off the backup program on their side? The backup company can't do anything about it - besides maybe notice the backup didn't take place and call them - even then, say it happens on a Friday.. they're likely not going to be backed up all weekend. Office burns down, and there's an old backup.. the backup company can't be held responsible for that.
Re:Honesty *NOT* (Score:2)
But that same gamma ray burst, with only one ray hitting 1 disk drive, hitting the 1 sector that contains your data "root". Should NEVER make you lose anything. This is just normal processing.
That is why raid and tape backups are around. Exspecially since your are paying a fee to them monthly to keep your data safe.
Re:Honesty (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm... the ends of those sentence fragments are usually "... or your money back."
In other words, they aren't promising 100%, just an attempt at 100% with you being compensated if it's less than that. Obviously they have a financial incentive to keep it at 100%.
Re:Honesty (Score:5, Interesting)
Respected? No way! If it said "we can't provide a 100% guarantee that we can recover the data that we make two different off-site backups for," then I can understand. Or even, "we can only guarantee that 95% of your nighty backups will be successful" is OK.
But the quote says they won't even guarantee it gets backed up at all! They don't even need to attempt it. It's like providing an email service and not guaranteeing that your SMTP server isn't pointing to
Re:Honesty (Score:3, Informative)
Scary? No, that's plain honesty. Which should be respected.
You think? I'm the poster of the article and those were my exact words (though they took out my GMail question....). I think that your example is extreme: you're looking at there's no 100% guarantee
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing personal, but this is total fucking nonsense.
It's a throw away line by one guy at the company. It's not a contract or definitive statement of policy. It's just one guy being honest. They *can't* provide 100% guaranteed reliability. NOBODY can provide 100% guaranteed reliability. You cannot predict the future.
They may do everything in their power to ensure that your data is available, but they cannot guarantee that it always will be every time no matter what. That's impossible. And that's all the guy is really stating here. If you somehow read it as "well, it's impossible, so we don't even try" then you're reading a hell of a lot more into it than is actually there.
Re:Honesty (Score:3, Interesting)
ibackup (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not too worried by the comment from the ibackup spokesperson. I think they have to say this as there is always a chance of some dataloss.
Anyway, ibackup is not the only backup I do.
they have already lost some info before... (Score:5, Funny)
hotmail worth every penny payed (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow thanks I still have all my Hotmail spam! (Score:5, Funny)
who would store this sort of info on hotmail ? (Score:5, Interesting)
why would someone store such important info on hotmail ? The notices saying they can't garentee your data won't disappear isn't there for PR. Its obvious things like this can happen so why not store it on something like a floppy. I mean hotmail doesn't even give you a lot of space. I haven't used it for a while but isn't it 3mb ? At least it was a free account and not one where he was paying for extra storage. That would have made it a hell of a lot worse if he was paying for the service.
Very common (Score:4, Insightful)
2) people with no computer of thier own
3) people who want access to the information from multiple computer or while away from thier own
Which includes many of the following:
a) college students
b) the poor
c) business people working at many locations and away from a fixed site (note that many networks previously used for internet access are now closed to personal laptops)
d) travellers using internet cafes during a trip
Scary? (Score:5, Insightful)
The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
Duh. There are no 100% guarantees of anything in life. The only significance of any "guarantee" is the recourse the company gives you (e.g. your money back) if they fail to live up to it.There's no guarantee that your in-house backup system won't eat your data. There's no guarantee your brand new car won't explode. There's no guarantee that FedEx will absolutely, positively, not lose your package, let alone get it there overnight.
Re:Scary? (Score:5, Insightful)
At least with FedEx, they will compensate you if they lose the package, provided you declared a value. I think $100 coverage is free with the shipment.
Guarantee = money (Score:5, Insightful)
That is a 100% guarantee, but is not unlimited liability. Unlimited liability (in case of failure) is not something any business is eager to provide.
Re:Scary? (Score:2)
No guarantee (Score:5, Insightful)
If they promote themselves as providing a backup service then it probably doesn't matter if they say they don't guarantee it in the fine print. They would almost certainly be legally liable for failure to provide the service as advertised if they didn't provide that service. There are legal customer rights which companies you can't get round, forunately. (At least in Europe, but I suspect it is the same in the USA).
Seems fair to me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Go tell your system vendor that you want guaranteed 100% service and watch his beeming grin appear.
Re:Seems fair to me. (Score:2, Informative)
So how is this possible? Easy; have a competent IT staff. A monkey can administer a properly working backup system, and if you want to stay in the managed hosting business, a working backup system is absolutely essential. Obviously there's
I was out of the country for 8 months... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't use MS products or services if you don't have too. It's not cause I think they suck, it's because they don't care. It's as simple as that.
Re:I was out of the country for 8 months... (Score:3)
Imagine if they left all the idle accounts alone and just let them accumulate SPAM or whatever. That's hardly good system policy.
However evil Microsoft may or may not be, you cannot really use them as an answer to your own ignorance.
Second account for backup (Score:5, Insightful)
Hotmail Mares (Score:5, Informative)
I also had a nightmare at one stage with Hotmail. I logged on one day and everything in sent items was gone. It was due to 'changes in service'. I was not amused and of course there is no way one can actually contact Hotmail - hell I don't know where this woman found their number! I'm impressed.
Needless to say I changed provider which is also free and gives me 6Mb instead of 2 (mail.vu).
Why would they? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would iBackup offer it? For some reason, software makers (myself included) have been able to get away without guaranteeing anything for a long time. We don't finish projects sometimes, and even if we do, we don't guarantee you even get what you want.
What is interesting, mind you, is that some consider this more realistic. The way Product Liability cases have been going the last 50 years, software is kind of lucky not to be included. Think of the awards for McDonalds coffee 'users;' people who eat glass and complain there was no sticker saying not to.
If we demand courts throw away the disclaimers of liability by companies like iBackup or Microsoft, it could definitely hurt open source. If they throw out Windows' disclaimers of liability the GPL's disclaimer might not be far off. What if people could sue free software authors directly? That would be scary.
It's a double-edged sword, and frankly, I don't know which way I'd like it to go. Anyone?
Re:Why would they? (Score:3, Interesting)
Say a law was passed such that the liability would be limited to the amount paid for the software, unless otherwise agreed, like insurance or a special additional paid support package giving greater liabilities.
Would that make you happy?
Re:Why would they? (Score:4, Interesting)
No kidding. Consider how thoroughly medical proffessionals have been ass-fucked [acep.org] by lawyers...
Nothing is 100% secure.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Same thing with Ibackup. Imagine if they promised with 100% certainty that your data was safe, and something occured that killed your data.
Always A Risk (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly, data loss is always a risk no matter what you pay. The only thing you can do is take actions to minimize any potential loss. Given that, this really isn't news.
Obligatory /. Fan Service: Oh, but this is Microsoft Hotmail! I'm outraged! Damn EULA!!
That feels so much better!
From the article: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a hotmail account myself because some of my friends use MSN messenger (I use Gaim myself- find me on Yahoo, ICQ, MSN and of course, Jabber). Glad I never actually employed this mail account for mail purposes...
Do other services have a "no business use" type disclaimer? Is Google liable if they chuck out 800MB of your GMail?
PFFT! (Score:3, Funny)
Besides, who cares if Hotmail loses data. I lose data all the time. I don't get upset. Why should I get upset if my email provider loses some worthless mail. Anything important, I make a couple of copies and keep them around on CD, encrypted of course!
and it continues... (Score:2, Interesting)
I thing that 'system events' may happen with any service provider, but because it happened to a MS related company, that's why it's being trumpeted on
iBackup, an Internet-based backup company (Score:2)
Happened to me (Score:3, Interesting)
While I've exported my important email to Thunderbird, I still have plenty of non-crucial stuff in Hotmail. It wouldn't have been the end of the world had the files been deleted, but it was pretty disconcerting none-the-less.
I finally sent them an email explaining the problem and my annoyance. I recieved a form e-mail saying I would get a response within 24 hours.... which I didn't. Though all my e-mails have stayed intact so far... but it's only been a few days. If the problem doesn't come back, it seems to imply the problem is fixable.
The Slashdot bias strikes again... (Score:2)
Yeah, it's a damn shame that some user's info was lost. And it's even more a shame that it looks like it was some of them who were paying for it. But anyone who honestly puts complete faith in a human-devised storage
Re:The Slashdot bias strikes again... (Score:3)
If it's worth keeping its worth backing up (Score:3, Interesting)
The true value of hotmail is your email account is accessable anywhere.
Why not an Isp email account ?
How often do you change providers?
Myself I have had accounts with
demon, fci, virgin, bt, NTL tiscali...
If you use the ISP's email services you have to migrate your email account a pain in the
for me far worse than Hotmail is Outlook Express.
Downloaded Email from hotmail to my PC.
deleted my Email from my hotmail account.
(regaining the space to recieve new messages).
15 Minutes later my Pc logs itself into hotmail and sync's outlook express with my hotmail account.
DELETING my unread mail from my PC.
Is it wrong to think that hotmail is the postbox where i collect my mail and when I want to sync my mail I mean get any mail from the hotmail server that isn't already on my Pc so I can read it off line?
I am sure everyone keeps all their important mail on the mat behind the front door and any mail anywhere else, such as your desk is unimportant and should go in the trash.
I think thats when I really started to hate Microsoft.
John.
"System events" ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course no one can guarantee a 100% rate of security. In commercial aerial transport the norm is one incident in a million of movements, it'd be nice if the same rate was enforced in IT as a general rule.
netscape.net email (Score:4, Interesting)
In the mean time, I've been changing my junk/product mail to yahoo.com, since I can download it into my maildir using fetchyahoo.pl . That way, at least it goes through their spam filters once before going through my local spamassasin daemon.
Netscape's webmail also really sucked in that you could only delete spam a pageful of 25 at a time
Just so that I'm marginally on topic, I've been able to avoid hotmail ever since they got bought by MS way back when. I take it this data loss means they finally succeeded in migrating from FreeBSD to Win** Server?
No company will guarentee 100% (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey. Don't think! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, there you go. That's what happens when you don't think.
I lost a month's worth on Hotmail (Score:3, Informative)
What ended up happening is that I was in the middle of an ISP migration, and used Hotmail on March 30th to download all my remaining POP messages that I kept stored (e.g. important or frequently-accessed messages) on my ISP's server before my account was deactivited. Typically I would then go home and import that mail from Hotmail into a local mail file. What actually happened was I got busy for a couple of days, and when I logged in on 4/1 (April fool's day!) I had an empty Hotmail box.
I complained and got a form letter response a couple of days later, saying they hoped I understood, but they had experienced a system "event" and were working to restore data. Anything not restored within 72 hours would not be recovered. Thank you for understanding.
I never got a single message back. Fortunately, none of the info I lost was business-related, only family and event planning data, but it goes to show what MS gives you, even when you PAY for service.
I used to use hotmail... (Score:3, Insightful)
Its not that I hate Microsoft, its that I just don't trust them with my data.
Re:110% (Score:2)
It doesn't necessarily mean 110% of potential, it can refer to previous efforts.
Re:110% (Score:3, Insightful)
But naturally nobody wants to pay 120%, 200%, 1000%...