Tech Per

Previously, I asked all you guys on what online storage service to buy, for a system that I developed. You all brought good advice to the table, and I ended up with StrongSpace by Joyent. (my fault). Well, it seems the name of the service should be WeakSpace. It sure as hell does not seem strong right now.

This night (the night between saturday and sunday), I received an email with this message:

… Strongspace was pulled offline on January 12th and is currently undergoing emergency maintenance…

Wouv! That is a full 8 days ago, and they are still not up yet. If I go to my strongspace account, I get a service out of order like message. Hmm. When I set this up some time ago, I just put in a small batch job, which launches rsync every night, to backup files to the strongspace account. This batch job, of course has told me nothing about any problems (my mistake). I am only now noticing, that we have had no backup for over a week from initial failure. How can joyent wait over a week, before sending me a notice about the problem? Not nice.

There is information about it here and here. This seems to be no small problem. They mention it as a problem with ZFS and the hardware they are running it on. Whatever. As long as I get access and my data are intact. It will indeed be exciting, if the data are intact. They mention, that the problem has sneaked into the backups too. Really not nice.

I probably should note, that I have been happy with the service up until now. But in my opinion, this kind of break-down, for that many days, is what makes or breaks an online storage service like StrongSpace. It is all about stability and trust. Trusting that the service is up and you data is there, accessible, ready for you, when you need them. At all times. And it is not so on StrongSpace!