Are you bloody joking ?

[outthedoor]

um, some of us aren't getting any email at ALL, remember.

[William9]

What is astonishing to me is that there is no redundancy structured into FastMail. If one lousy server goes down, a whole segment of FastMail paid customers lose service. I thought FastMail was structured to avoid this type of service interruption. I'm willing to pay more to get reliable service. Anyone know what companies provide reliable IMAP service for customers own their own domain name?

[jgerry2002]

This was probably the worst possible day for this to happen.

I had just received critical information regarding coordinating a trip half way across the country that is going to start tomorrow morning.

Never got a chance to get the information out of the account before Server 2 blew up.

Now I need to wait 45 hours?

I am also a net admin, and I should have sympathy for something like this, but I have little sympathy for a 45+ hour restore time.

With the posts I've read, it seems that losing a bunch of drives like this would lead me to believe that the scsi controller is at fault rather than the drives.

[allpar]

Gotta admit I'm also surprised there's no disk array being used for backup, with hard drives being relatively cheap.

I do understand they have to be on a budget with their prices so low, but still...

[EdGillett]

There IS a disk array (there are two 4TB (4000GB) RAID6 arrays), but unfortunately one suffered the loss of 3 drives.

The overall infrastructure redundancy, including a better way of managing a 4TB file system I believe is under discussion at FM.

[allpar]

A separate array for backups? And that went bad too? Then I'm glad they have tape!

Makes you wonder how culpable they were vs whether they just had really really really bad luck.

[disneylogic]

not happy about this, not at all.

i don't see the point of making threats about leaving or anything, but as i've written in another thread, i definitely need to plan some kind of email contingency for my business.

what i do not know to do about, is the email i have stored at FastMail, taking advantage of their widely advertised 2 GB storage capacity for the top-of-the-line user. of course they did not say (who would?) that there's a possibility that at some random time you'll lose it all. if i cannot rely upon that stuff being saved reliably what's the sense of having 2 GB of storage? noone fills up that space with a few hundred emails. my collection of 400 MB of email consists of thousands of individual emails and is pretty irreplaceable.

i have of course backed up some of the most important things but, still....

moreover, how do you transfer 400 MB of email you want online. can't. not really. i can download it into files, using the archiving capability, but i can't really move it.

yeah, there's probably some IMAP magic possible to do the latter. FastMail helped me move things from Yahoo when i came here.

but, well, i just feel jilted, and i feel somehow like others have voiced that because i'm a paying customer i am getting worse service than people with smaller accounts.

[Xenna]

http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/imap-backup.php

As well as others.
Google is your friend (as least he's more reliable than FM)

X.

[wombat88]

Thanks for that link, Xenna. I have backed up everything in my FM account now. I think I'll be using that program a lot.

[Terry]

We still think the system is over loaded with tooooo many free accounts.

[Trip]

I've got news for the people who are flinging words like "failover" and "redudancy" around this thead as if they were two-bit commodities: You haven't got the slightest idea about the appropriate price to pay for incorporating the technologies you're coin-phrasing into an operation like Fastmail.

For God sakes, go out on the net right now. Look at the uptime ratings at Netcraft, who those companies are, and what the charge. Hell, go get a quote from NYI.net (FastMail's current host) or RackSpace (FastMail's former host) if you want. After you pick yourself up off the floor from your heart attack, you may just realize how lucky you are to be inside a datacenter like NYI for $40 or less paid to Fastmail, all while enjoying FM's other host of features on top of that deal.

YOU ARE ONLY ENTITLED TO WHAT YOU PAY FOR, and until you realize the value of what it is you're commoditizing so non-chalantly, you're better off on going back to Gmail or Hotmail, where "redudancy" can be had for free.

If you want failover redudancy and SLAs from a single premium provider, then you have to pay for it. Plain and simple. Either pay up, or come to the realization that it's out of your league and you have to make due with what you've got. How about having your FM account forward backups to Yahoo, or whoever? There's some redudancy right there. And you don't even have to b|tch to make it happen; you can go and do it right now. I'll bet Fastmail is working a lot harder at delivering you your email that your giving them credit for, so maybe it's time you take up the rest of the slack and make sure these problems don't happen again on your end of things. Use a beefy free account. Or pay for your own RackSpace co-located server clusters. It's your call.

Trip

[Terry]

yes I agree trip but it is so hard for some people who run a business, but then I would have a back up facility anyway.

I have my domain with f/m took it away today then though how stupid and childish one small hick up in almost 3 years, so configured it all back as I trust them with my mail.

Thanks f/m for providing so much for so little.

[Nozzle]

http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmai...isclaimer.html

[Xenna]

Originally posted by Nozzle
http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmai...isclaimer.html

Yes, but then there's this very annoying statement on the frontpage:

• FastMail provides fast, professional and reliable email

The point is that they should have calculated the consequences of a filesystem corruption. If they did and came up with 48 hours they should have either:

- reconsidered and chosen another storage strategy
- or taken the reliability claim off the frontpage

I am certain that what we're seeing here is the result of bad planning. Many small servers don't need to be more expensive than a few big ones. But they're a helluva lot quicker to restore in case of catastrophic failure.

You simple shouldn't store your data in chunks of 4TB if they take 2 days to restore.

X.

PS: I'm pretty sure there will be mail loss this time too.

[Trip]

@ Nozzle: Well found. Exactly what I was getting at.

@ Xenna:

The point is that they should have calculated the consequences of a filesystem corruption...

I wouldn't presume to think anyone has right to tell Fastmail what they should or shouldn't have done when one has the luxury of looking back on the situation.

I am certain that what we're seeing here is the result of bad planning.

I think you may have missed the bigger idea at play. In light of the disclaimer Nozzle pointed out, and my comments earlier on, what we're seeing here is just the manifestation of the inherent risk that you bought into by signing up with Fastmail. And I qualify that statement as neither good or bad. It's just plain and simple fact, and in response to Terry's concerns as well, I'm just trying to make people realize this fact in the context of all of their complaints. It doesn't excuse Fastmail from fixing the problems, but it clearly defines what is and is not to be expected. Period.

Trip