"You Must Be Super Busy, Since My Letter is Three Months Old Now"

At writethecompany.com, there are amusing stories of company communications and the lack thereof.  The title of this blog post reflects just such as a lack, this time by the manufacturer of Better Life green cleaning products, who took three months to respond to a letter from writethecompany.com. 

A central, if implied, message of writethecompany.com is that clever letter-writing doesn't always produce better, or more prompt responses than fiery, obscenity-filled expressions of outrage.

But it should. Instead of relying on the sturm und drang of dialectic disagreement, each post is a pleasant but insistent (sometimes cleverly indirect) essay on enterprise responsibility or consumer rights. Some might draw the line at teasing out the difference between the taste of gray squirrel and red squirrel as judged by the British palate. On the other hand, in the post "Old Spice Roulette," writethecompany.com acknowledges a generous response from the manufacturer Olde Thompson -- including free replacement products -- but politely observes that the manufacturer does not address the original offense -- i.e., fading product labels, as carefully observed in the original writethecompany.com letter:

The reason I’m writing is to inform you about some spices now on my rack called Ba l, hyme and Italia soning. At one time, they were known as Basil, Thyme and Italian Seasoning. Whatever you’re using to print names on the caps doesn’t seem to be worth its salt. Rather than reaching for specific spices on my rack, I’m concerned that I will soon be racking my brains to figure out which spice is which after the letters are all gone. Of course, I’ll always be able to spot the Sage.
Variety is the spice of life, but if you can’t tell which variety the spice is, what kind of life can you have as a chef?

Two Weeks Notice to Get Offa My Cloud

Two weeks notice.  No, not as part of a mass layoff -- Lord knows there have been enough of those -- but that was the notice, according to ZDNet,  given by Intuit to its Quicken Online service that they had to move to a new online platform.  As "Lostlogic," one disgruntled commenter, put it, this is typical of online products: "No connection, no work done / Trust someone else with your data / Forced to change at any time / Slow and clumsy interfaces / Totally at mercy of others ..."  Maybe not THAT bad, and not all the time, but point taken.

Carbonite's 90-Day OId Trouble Ticket: Prelude

Carbonite is one of several online backup services.  Previously I was a customer of HP's discontinued Upline service, so I was somewhat hasty in the search for a replacement service. There's been considerable marketing of Carbonite of late, and several Twitter posts that were worth responding to.

The service did appear to back up several hundred GB over the expected week or so of uploading. Everything seemed normal until my RAID crash forced a restore.  The requirement was a 100% restore of everything backed up for this account at Carbonite.

The restore succeeded only partially.  The restore, which operated by restoring the smallest files first, stalled and would not resume.  

In addition to losing the unrestored backups, this has meant that the Carbonite client must remain in restore mode, meaning that it is unusable for new backups until the problem is resolved. Customers in this situation must use other backup methods in the interim, and figure out how to merge the two if Carbonite is able to ultimately resolve the problem.

This incident occurred a few days before 22 June 2009.

Since then, the following CSRs have handled the case: Shawn, Amy, Leena, Vince, Abe, Pam,  Arthur and Ashton.  There were three separate (unrelated) attempts to log in remotely (using GoToAssist), but the extensive logs produced by Carbonite were -- even when zipped -- too large to transfer successfully using the file transfer service built into the remote application.  I offered to put the archives on my ftp or web servers for them to download, but the CSRs were apparently prohibited from taking this step.

The current status is that the problem has been "referred to Engineering."  The case has been in this status now since June.

Carbonite's underlying technology is nontrivial, based on what can be seen from the logs on the client machine.  It's probably not possible to diagnose this particular problem without the logs, though it would not be surprising to be asked to try again with a new release.

A longer version of this incident with commentary will follow. 

Some problems (not this one, unfortunately) are addressed at the Carbonite Community at GetSatisfaction.  Visit their profile on Crunchbase or learn who participated in their last venture round.

See Carbonite's lightly visited BBB listing in Boston.

Following is a list of other reported technical or other issues with Carbonite.  Claims and counter-claims, for and against the Company, should be assessed with a skeptical eye:

• Brent Ozar  and his later post
  
• Techcrunch story on Carbonite's suite vs. Promise Technology 
• Steve Duplessie  
• Mike McDerment and others on FreshBooks.com 
• Silvexis 
• James G    
• James Thigpen 
• Mike Baska   
• Heinz Dinter

Update 19 October 2009  Was recontacted by a Carbonite Representative to reopen the case.   Will report on disposition.


Update 3 December 2009  I was finally contacted by a capable technical support representative.  According to Carbonite's Technical Support Rep, there was a breakdown in support workflow within Carbonite; despite my repeated requests for status on my escalated trouble report, escalation apparently did not occur.

Kirk, a senior Technical Support Representative, was able to install a new version of the Carbonite client, which successfully connected to some of my archives on the Carbonite farm.  A  detailed Carbonite log analysis was unnecessary for this exercise.  The TSR was capable and knowledgeable of the product.  However,  I noticed that entire partitions that had been put on the backup list did not appear and could not be restored.  Kirk asked others in the organization to look at older versions of the backup, and after a few weeks, he notified me that no further data could be restored.

I have a guess as to what happened, but it's highly speculative.  Since my rebuilt system had a slightly different layout of drive letters and partition identification, it's possible that the older Carbonite client was unable to associated items to be restored with the new layout.  The Carbonite client application operates as an extension of Windows explorer, so it's easy to imagine how this confusion might arise.  Just a guess. That said, it does not explain why the missing partitions weren't on the backups at Carbonite, where they should have been saved in the May-June 2009 timeframe.  It wasn't the case of a few missing files, but perhaps 50GB of files, including almost 10,000 lossless (FLAC) rips of music files.

Conclusion  The Carbonite technology can be quite good, especially if you have high speed broadband.  I have this with an upgraded Verizon FIOS that features fast inbound and (this is important) outbound speeds.  But it should be not relied upon as the sole backup, especially for whole-system outages that require recreating entire machine environments. As the old saying goes, miniscule software errors -- or simply design limitations -- can have large consequences. This is the case with a few hundred gigs of precious data.  On my network, I've implemented a local backup capability using Backup for Workgroups.  I'm happy with this so far, especially since it has a good de-duplicating capability and works with both server and client operating systems.  It's not a disaster recovery solution for the next Nor'easter,  broken water pipe in the basement, or California wildfire.  More than one backup solution is needed, even for casual home users.

What is PlzHold.com?

The purpose of this blog is to identify systemic problems -- usually related to CRM, but not always -- that arise from specific customer service incidents. The incidents happen to come from personal experience, but I do my best to offer neutral versions of the events.  In addition to the "more heat than light" problem that arises from too much emotion in some posts in the wild, there is a tendency to overlook the issues encountered by the enterprise. Where it makes sense, I try to identify, or at least imagine, what the issues may be on the service supplier side.  The issues are sometimes completely beyond the control of the Customer Service Agent (CSR).  However, the CSR is often the public face of the enterprise, and the added scrutiny observers such as this ex-CSR is to be expected.