Backify gets the boot, but good
Backify, which recently restated its policy froim 512GB free to $17.95 a year, appears to have gotten the boot from the Livedrive reseller program. While it’s impossible to know the driving factors, one would guess the unsustainability of the model itself was a key factor, since LiveDrive charges much more than Backify ever pretended to.
This email was sent to various Backify users this morning and appears on Ivo Flipse’s Google plus page and other sources
Dear <username>
We are writing to you regarding BACKIFY.COM who you recently created an online backup account with. BACKIFY.COM was a reseller of Livedrive (http://www.livedrive.com). Livedrive provided the technology and service behind the product offered to you by BACKIFY.COM.
We are writing to inform you that BACKIFY.COM is no longer a Livedrive reseller and the services that they purchased from our company on your behalf have been terminated. If you are using a service provided by BACKIFY.COM and powered by Livedrive then this service will now have stopped working.
We would also like to advise you that we have received a number of complaints about BACKIFY.COM from their customers and from industry organizations. We would like to advise you not to provide any credit card information to BACKIFY.COM. If you have provided credit card information to BACKIFY.COM then we would suggest contacting your card provider and informing them that your card may be used fraudulently. If BACKIFY.COM have charged your card for services not provided you should contact your card provider and ask them to initiate a chargeback procedure.
Please note that this advisory is being sent to you in good faith because we feel you should be informed that BACKIFY.COM is no longer a Livedrive reseller and of the complaints we have become aware of. No contract exists between yourself and Livedrive and we are not able to assist further in any dispute you may have with BACKIFY.COM.
If you have installed the online backup software provided by BACKIFY.COM we highly recommend you uninstall it from your computer by following the steps below:
Please note that any data you backed up using BACKIFY.COM cannot be retrieved and we recommend you establish an alternative backup service immediately.
Livedrive does provide a very similar online backup service to the one provided by BACKIFY.COM and you can read more details and, if you wish, signup for a trial on our website athttp://www.livedrive.com. Please note however that we do not provide a free service as BACKIFY.COM did.
Clearly, Backify used the loose terms of a reseller agreement with Livedrive to create instances for customers, rebrand the product, and perform backups without following through. Based on Livedrive’s response, Backify is likely to have been a fraudulent arrangement with intent to steal customer credit card data at the very least. The wiping of those instances further eludes to a truly bad situation where livedrive couldn’t guarantee users that their data wasn’t being stolen without authorization via the reseller program.
As they say, beward of greeks (or backup providers) bearing gifts
A different kind of Network
As virtualization becomes the norm in infrastructure, changes are going to occur in administration and networking that will makes roles the same but different.
Traditional SMB IT is based around assisting clients with building their own in-house IT department. And for some companies that model works. As cloud computing becomes a more viable and less costly option, the push to have your own administrator and your own server has been reduced to a much smaller group of professionals. To a certain extent, your basic desktop/wireless/firewall for a small company can be handled by a few tech savvy youths in the company and security/administration become more of a pay for it when you can afford it later on type of proposition.
For some fly by night entrepreneurial startups this might make sense at first. And it’s not likely to change as every business looks to save money in some form. Just recently we coached a law firm into getting the free Google Apps for their email. At least it was an upgrade from their free email they got from their ISP. Regardless of whether we like these changes or not what matters is the service that individual organizations get from the opportunities available. They don’t really care if their database is searched for common phrases that help companies target them for advertising. To them, cost is what comes out of your checkbook.
When the 2-3 person staff becomes 5-10 that’s when things begin to change. The features available for free don’t match up to what’s on the cloud for $1,000 per year, and so many companies start to move from non-infrastructure to cloud computing. A firm that generates a million in revenue actually has business at stake and it needs to be addressed by some set of features and backup that are at least in theory reliable and cloud fills that gap nicely.
Ultimately though these fluctuations between free, remote and hosted can be mitigated by a simpler concept – the office server. It’s true that many companies consider these costs prohibitive but what if the price matched remotely hosted applications? As firms begin to tighten their grip on their security and data, locally hosted storage and applications will begin to make all the difference again, as it did years ago.
The change from remote cloud to a local cloud
The change will be the ability of IT administrators to bring those concepts to bear in-house for the SMB market as software vendors modify their pricing structure in such a way as to make all of the available options more affordable. Gmail at $1,000 per year or a local server for the same price? Office 365 for $2,500 per year or MS Office + Exchange + File server for $2,500 per year?
The choice will be easy for companies to digest as soon as the ability to make viable systems at these price targets improves – and it is almost already here. We recently constructed servers of a much smaller size, with all the speed and seek time we expect from the best SQL/Exchange server at half the cost. And providers like MS haven’t stepped up to the plate yet as they pursue the cloud, but when they understand the opportunity that exists for small sites, they will start to roll out soft programs. The relative cost of an SBS server is fairly minimal if you can keep from paying the IT guy 60 hours a year to manage it. This is where the virtualization part starts to work. Just one hypervisor (free from MS, or just a few hundred from VM), provides the admin with a wealth of backup and support tools the traditional service lacks in spades.
IT departments are what need to shape up. The expected profit from a sale has become far too greedy in a weak decade. Once the local solution is the cloud solution but in your office, the change will spring back.
Don't let your bevy of cloud providers start looking like bad cable management
How to Properly Delegate your IT Department
IT Managers are a lonely bunch. They spend most of their time fixing the problems their own staff can’t handle and the rest of the time trying to figure out how to prevent those same problems from happening to begin with. Around them, their co-workers circle like hungry dogs waiting for a massive failure so they can preach their own economic incentive (moving to the cloud, switching operating systems or even firing everyone but themselves).
While most competent IT administrators can handle most of these pressures, there are some situations which simply can’t be accounted for an require their expertise even in times of absenteeism (training seminars, visiting remote offices or vacations). In order to supplement their own IT infrastructure they either accept that they are always on call, tell each junior staff member a piece of the puzzle (even if they don’t understand the whole infrastructure), or use an outside vendor for support. These days, the outside vendor option has become the best option and is gaining some popularity for several reasons:
- The trusted outsourced IT company is actually working with the IT Manager to make sure they everything works exactly as expected, rather than hoping for failure as an opportunity to capitalize on someone’s impending doom.
- The experienced vendor can interact with the mid-level IT staff on multiple levels since a positive relationship already exists and can be leveraged to motivate and keep the team members focused on good practices.
- Local vendors can be onsite as quickly as any other IT staff member, yet boast far superior overall knowledge not only of the customer’s environment, but hundreds of other similar infrastructures.
- In case of extended absence or unexpected unavailability of the IT admin, the local tech can help the company to continue until the situation is resolved.
While no solution is perfect when the Senior IT admin is away, having someone trustworthy on the outside is perhaps the best way to keep their job safe and secure.
And perhaps toss in some peace of mind at the end of the day too.
Winter Wonderland – White New Year
A nice patch of snow this year. Haven’t had this much since December 1995 – so almost 15 years to the day.
Two nice pictures of a street in Queens. The first was at 7 AM when we woke up. Snow drifted over the cars on the street. The second shot is what happens when you decide to drive up the street through the snowdrift. He’s got a late model AWD with all 4 wheels spinning. He’s been at it over 2 hours already trying to dig out.
Update: 10 AM – So right after the first guy finally digs his way out backwards the next dummy takes his place!
Wind blows snow over cars over 5'
Driving through a snowdrift = not driving
One idiot replaces another
Stuxnet Affiliate Rewards Program
Reduce your near-line nuclear fallout with the Stuxnet* program. Besides offering your customers the best in nuclear-refinery reduction, Stuxnet* also forces your nuclear neighbors to spend more time fixing plants and less time making bombs! With all of the top talent wasted on fighting Stuxnet* you can get back to diplomacy and start building your own nuclear facilities to counter the insurgency!
Stuxnet has not been claimed by any nation so insert your own malicious code and start pointing the finger at yourself today!
Reduce Nuclearisms with Stuxnet* from No.Co!
* Stuxnet may also inadvertently fuck your shit up.
Drive Errors
It is fairly rare when a client runs into a boot or load operation that can’t continue – but these are the most serious of computer issues. It can mean a bad file that stops operations, missing data, bad sector information, errant configuration of the boot sector, or any number of other missing operandi including a dead hard drive.
Hopefully some of the answers below will help you gain perspective on what can be done to fix most problems with your average PC or server.
The New York Tech Blog at NYTE
Each day, the engineers, systems administrators, and tech support staff of a myriad of companies is asked to solve problems both menial and important, urgent and irrelevant, complex and simple. Our goal each day is to write down our experiences which we have with clients on both a grand scale and a minor one. Attacks on the personal information storage device that is your computer and means to protect and recover your information. Such a chronicle would surely drive any man mad. But then again, we are not men.
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