I cant believe it!!!!! I am spending a lot of money from here in China for the backup service because as a teacher and new to admining my own server I thought tha tI should trust the dependability and let people run a back up service who knew what they wre doing. I could never imagine they would TOTALLY FAIL?!?!?!!?!?!?


I thought I would fail and could rely on their service!!!

HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN?!?!?!?!?!


SOOO BIG PROBLEMS NOW!


THANKS LINODE!!>!>!>!?!!>!>!

Quality post sir.

Also, I'm guessing user error. You might want to send in a ticket to see if they can retrieve your data.

I wrote a message for support some days ago because a snapshot I made was failing. It wouldnt complete when I clicked on snapshot.

I was nto aware the entire backup system was completely failing and would be for a week. There is absolutely no user failure. The backup service at linode should be advertised as discontinued or completely out of service very clearly.

: (


Hi Robert,

Please accept our sincere apologies for the issues you're experiencing. As advised in your previous support ticket (#488819), the backup service in the Fremont, CA is currently undergoing maintenance which is preventing backups for your Linode from being taken. Our backups team have been working diligently to restore functionality, but unfortunately some unforeseen circumstances has been delaying this process. Once the maintenance is complete and the Linode Backup system is back in an operational state, backups for your Linode will begin processing normally.

With that said, I have spoken to a Linode Backups administrator and I've been advised that we would be able to restore your last successful snapshot (taken: 2011-06-15 02:04:36) back to your Linode if you require access to it. Again, I'm truly very sorry for any inconvenience this may be causing you and we'll certainly do what we can to assist you.

Please let us know if you would like to have the 6-day old backup restored.

-Danny

The rest of the the data centres are fine so no, however something on status.linode.com for fremont would be good. I imagine if you request a refund for the failed time you'll get one.

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While the failing backups in Fremont are indeed unfortunate, this ought to be a lesson to all of us to never trust our backups to a single entity. I would highly recommend performing your own backups in addition to the Linode backups. If you ever need to restore from your own backup, it's not going to be as seamless as restoring from one of the Linode backups, but at least you'll have your data.

Linode should really do something about Fremont. All these glitches and outages can't be good for Linode's reputation. Time to find another West Coast datacenter, guys!

I think they still are billing me for it even . not time to check. killer amount of work due to data failure in linode..

Well thats life : ( .

so i guess my question is.. what caused your failure in the first place? Not the fremont issue, but the one on your linode that caused you to want your backups? Was that user error or..?

and was the last successful backup able to help you or not.

Likewise, have you been checking the status of your backups, or just assuming that everything is fine?

Because i know if i noticed that my backups were failing constatly, apart from logging a support issue, id be ensuring that i had my own backup somewhere incase i needed it..

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Do you suggest everyone of us should login to linode control panel daily to check backup status?

If the data or service that your linode is providing is that sensitive, critical, or otherwise important then the question should be:

why arent I checking my linode backups daily if that is the only backup I have when I know I should have offsite too because my stuff is to important to lose?

Does it matter? I mean, thats what daily backups are for, right? I am developing things, and sometimes need to call on backups..



6 days ago is an eternity I had to take a train from mainland china to hongkong, and habve a distand relative in the us open a bank account just to assume the backups were going to be "ok"

I thought I was making sure when I paid for the service. Go figure.

Thats insane. If the backup service is sensitive, and the reputationis of a reliable host, you are paying for that reliability and reputation. You are paying to not have to check everyday.

AntiNSA... As an aside... every post I've ever seen from you, you're flying off the handle about one thing or another (often being very sarcastic and antagonistic).

Obviously the backups shouldn't have failed, and I expect Linode will make it right (as they've always done in the past).

My guess is, you'll get a lot further with people if you tone down your language a bit. Right now you come across like some crazy person ranting and raving all the time. That's not always the best way to get your problems solved.

No, it's not insane. Any admin worth anything should be testing and checking their backups on a regular basis. If you're not, well.... This stuff tends to happen to those who are not testing their backups.

I've seen it dozens of times over the years as some small company thinks they have a backup solution in place. Some non-tech person has been shown how to change the tapes out daily and take them home. OOPS, server crashed. Their "IT" consultant comes in and tries to restore from the tapes, OOPS, they haven't been tested lately and are no good.

Even with the backups from Linode, it's not something I'd 100% rely on EVER. They are taking a snapshot of your system in time. If you catch some process like MySQL in the middle of doing something critical. So you have no idea what kind of state your database is in when that snapshot is taken. Sure it might be fine most of the time, but it seems the chances of it not being good and that being the backup that's needed is always pretty high....

Also, since these are snapshots of your entire system. For me, it's only really something I'd use (am using) for an emergency backup. In my experience, backups are more frequently accessed for file level restoration. In such case, Linode's snapshots a kind of a pain to do that.

I commented in another thread that Linode should consider adding alerting capabilities for backup status. If you don't want it, turn it off. If you do, then enter your email address and have it email you with the status of the last backup.

Right now I'm logging into the console daily, but at some point, I'd really rather not have to do that, just to see whether backups failed.

(And they failed again in Fremont last night. Sigh)

Thanks,
bruce