Barracuda Copy Shutting Down (barracuda.com) 52
New submitter assaf07 writes: I received a notification [Monday] that Barracuda's excellent online storage option Copy will be shuttting down in May. A blog post by Rod Matthews, VP of Storage at Barracuda gives the usual business doublespeak excuse. Having used Google's Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Spideroak, I am very disappointed to lose Copy as its native Linux, Android, IOS, and Windows clients are/were wonderful.
Well, I guess you could say... (Score:1)
Storing the dupe is better than duping the story.
/sunglasses
YYEEEAAAAAH!
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Duplication (Score:3)
VP of Storage at Barracuda gives the usual business doublespeak excuse.
That's just like a good clone.
Re:Duplication (Score:5, Informative)
VP of Storage at Barracuda gives the usual business doublespeak excuse.
That's just like a good clone.
Some of the doublespeak in question, from the first paragraph in TFA:
We are constantly evaluating our product portfolio in the context of our overall strategic goals. With that in mind, we have begun a process to focus our resources on our most strategic initiatives and to drive more innovation and faster growth within those products.
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What is in question is probably the part that the NSA isn't giving perks for promoting easily accessible cloud storage anymore so why bother with the app?
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What is in question is probably the part that the NSA isn't giving perks for promoting easily accessible cloud storage anymore so why bother with the app?
Good point.
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We are constantly evaluating our product portfolio in the context of our overall strategic goals. With that in mind, we have begun a process to focus our resources on our most strategic initiatives and to drive more innovation and faster growth within those products.
We're considering which products to axe and keeping the ones that are doing better.
ownCLoud (Score:4, Interesting)
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This works well for some people (hell, I have a basement server). But I want off-premises backup. Services like Crashplan, Dropbox, etc. are perfect for this. Sure, you could find a technically-inclined friend - but sometimes things aren't worth the hassle and unpredictable bandwidth usage.
Re:ownCLoud (Score:4, Interesting)
Backup off site is easy...
I use Open Media Vault which has a plugin that you can copy your entire share onto a USB or eSATA device any time it's plugged in. So I have a RAID 5 array that gets me about 3 Tb of space on 4 drives (and a hot spare). I bought three 3 TB drives and I just rotate them between my offsite location (my work desk drawer) the fire poof lock box in the closet and the file server on a regular basis. This way I generally will have 5 copies of all my data (two in the RAID, one on the attached drive and two external) most of the time. Overkill? Yea, but it's simple.
When I fill up the 3TB or the cheap 1TB drives start to fail, I'll buy a couple of 6TB drives, grow the array by substituting the 1TB drives one at a time with my 3TB backups and a couple of new ones which will be cheap by then and continue the rotation strategy.
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I have a RAID 5 array that gets me about 3 Tb of space on 4 drives (and a hot spare).
Then I hope your backup solution works because the day one of those disks shits itself, odds are you'll lose the entire array. Rebuilding large disks with a parity count is long and brutal on the spindle, and those 5 drives you bought are quite possibly coming from the same manufacturing batch and are exposed to the same environmental conditions as the one who failed. You're playing with fire.
DIsks are cheap, there's no reason to use anything but RAID-10.
And btw your "bring a backup to the office" scheme is
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Yeah, RAID5 is cool, but when the array goes non-redu
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For Pete's sake... No, my drives are from multiple manufacturers and given their serial numbers from multiple production runs. Seriously, I purchased them over a period of about a year as backup drives for my last file server. They became my primary drives when I retired the old IDE based system and migrated the data to this one.
My drives are not always spinning and routinely are in "power saving" mode most of the time because the file server is not heavily used. They are not slowly grinding themselves away
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My drives are not always spinning and routinely are in "power saving" mode most of the time because the file server is not heavily used.
The more I read your comments, the more it reminds me of Michael Scott when he describes Wikipedia: "anyone in the world can write about any subject, so you know you're getting the best possible information". You just bring up bad practice after bad practice and brag about it.
There's a reason why MAID never caught up.
So what did we learn from MAID? We learned that power management is far more difficult and complex than anyone had thought, and powering on and off drives up to 10s of times per day caused a number of reliability issues.
http://www.infostor.com/index/... [infostor.com]
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10 times per day? I seriously doubt it.. Maybe 3 times on average, and one of those is for the SMART test run..
Look, my point here is that there is few failure modes here that will cause me to loose the data on my RAID 5 array. I keep viable backups (and yes I test them from time to time) in multiple locations and while it would be expensive, I could recover from a catastrophic hardware failure with my data in hand within about 24 hours. I've seen major businesses with less capable backups and longer r
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I'm a penny pincher like my father before me. I drive may cars well past 100,000 miles and 10 years old and I save possibly useful scraps of hardware and cobble useful things like file servers out of it for personal use. But in this case I have a backup system which rivals most commonly used ones in business...
While I disagree with using RAID-5 (for anything) I have to give it to you, it's refreshing to see a thrifty attitude in this world of disposable iPhones and 5-year servers EOL. I would be obscenely wealthy if I had done that in the past instead of blowing money to the four winds.
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Yea, After reflection, using RAID 5 wasn't my best choice. However, I only had 4 disks at the time and it seemed to get me the two things I wanted, the maximum space and redundancy out of the software raid built into the Linux Kernel. I wasn't concerned about read/write performance all that much, after all it's usually connected to via a wireless device (my laptop) anyway.
IF I had an easy way to do this again, I'd be happy to go RAID 6 on 5 drives and get a bit more space and a bit better performance, bu
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Backup off site is easy...
I guess it's a money vs. time tradeoff. I find the online services far "easier" than physically swapping media to an offsite location. It's also more frequent.
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Just use owncloud with a hp n40L
OwnCloud is awesome like that. Personally, I rent a cheap VPS server with just enough disk space for my needs. But if you have the hardware and have a nice internet connection at home, that is also great.
Follow the money? (Score:3)
It may be that those costly services don't even have the functionality you were using (ie a Linux client).
I could be off-base and Backup is pretty different from Copy. I haven't used either.
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If they had millions of customers surely that's a decent chunk of revenue ... or is nobody actually paying for the service?
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Subscriptions were cheap and it was easy to get huge amounts of space for free - the service was more likely hemorrhaging money as a result.
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just follow slashdot deals if you want to see the next service that will follow suit. at the moment it's: https://deals.slashdot.org/sal... [slashdot.org] a lifetime subscription to 2TB cloud backup service for $49.
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Heh, one caught my eye yesterday - a life time subscription to a VPN service for $25. Yeah, thats going to last more than a month or so when everyones downloading 1TB a month...
Isn't important (Score:3)
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Try mover.io You have to give them access to your accounts for the process of moving the files but you can revoke that access immediately afterwards. I have used them when moving a couple of hundred gigs from Dropbox to Google.
What doesn't google or dropbox do that this did? (Score:4, Informative)
I never used this particular system but have used both dropbox and Google drive happily across multiple OS types and I can't figure out what I am missing out on.
Personally I use google drive which has native clients for mac & windows and use the google-drive-ocamlfuse system to mount google drive in Linux. It is easy to setup and works perfectly. http://gdfuse.forge.ocamlcore.... [ocamlcore.org]
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I believe there are two(ish) things:
1.) Self-hosted option.
2.) Integration with Outlook - send file attachments as links, without leaving the compose window.
(ish) the ability to self-host and integrate with Outlook, as well as one of Barracuda's claims to fame - their spam filter - made sending secure e-mails with attachments a seamless process.
So yeah, it had its niche.
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The usual business doublespeak excuse.... (Score:3)
You'd rather they simply posted "Take this job [order] and shove it, we ain't working here no more..."?
How about "assaf08 offered us a promotion and 50% more money so here's our 3 months notice..."?
Finally, there's "A monkey could do this job and our skills are being wasted, so before you outsource us to China we are so out of here..."
"[W]e have begun a process to focus our resources on our most strategic initiatives and to drive more innovation and faster growth within those products" is not doublespeak, it means that you are 1. not strategic 2. technologically stuck in the '00s and 3. a black pit of cheapitude. It's not doublespeak, it's an overly polite way to tell you not to let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Can you blame them? (Score:1)
They clearly underestimated the amount of space and bandwidth you weird fucks needed for your open-source hentai.
Bummer, most space for free on the cloud (Score:2)
Did they actually have customers? (Score:2)
For one, I only heard about their service when looking for Dropbox alternatives explicitly. It wasn't so visible.
Two, I signed up then gave up because their sync was damn slow. So slow that paying for dropbox seemed like the better alternative. They may have improved it after, but I never tried again.
That's a problem with the cloud (Score:2)
I didn't use Copy, but I've got a bleepload of stuff on Dropbox, and it would suck if it went out of business.
This feature alone... (Score:2)