Prior to the new Unofficial Nirvanix Users blog opening Nirvanix was specifically invited to comment on media reports that it was a Nirvanix employee that deleted millions of users files, but in its reply, did not do so. Today it has emailed alleging the TechCrunch article that reproduced a comment apparently from Charlie Jackson is 'inaccurate and libelous'.
Comments on this blog may refer to these allegations, so please see Nirvanix's response, linking to a longer article on its blog, at:
http://nirvanixusers.blogspot.com/2008/07/nirvanix-comment.html
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Monday, July 14, 2008
Unofficial Nirvanix users blog
If you are concerned that Nirvanix has your data and you would like it back, see:
http://nirvanixusers.blogspot.com/2008/07/about-this-blog.html
To my mind, Nirvanix should show a little more concern for users. If it was a company warehousing house contents I doubt it would be able to dump everything in the incinerator simply because an agent had mislaid some keys and their filing cabinet had fallen over and the index cards had become mixed up. Particularly if the warehousing company was part of the same enterprise when entrusted with the items.
http://nirvanixusers.blogspot.com/2008/07/about-this-blog.html
To my mind, Nirvanix should show a little more concern for users. If it was a company warehousing house contents I doubt it would be able to dump everything in the incinerator simply because an agent had mislaid some keys and their filing cabinet had fallen over and the index cards had become mixed up. Particularly if the warehousing company was part of the same enterprise when entrusted with the items.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Message from Nirvanix
The main discussion now is on The Linkup Users blog. See:
http://thelinkupusers.blogspot.com/
The latest post there is a message from Nirvanix regarding the files on its servers.
http://thelinkupusers.blogspot.com/
The latest post there is a message from Nirvanix regarding the files on its servers.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
The file backup service that never was: Mediamax is closing
This is from the unofficial users blog for The Link Up, the successor to Mediamax.
Those checking back to the official The Link Up blog for an update on the 29 June posting (which said the site was down for maintenance, though it was already back up), will have been shocked at the post today, 9 July 2008: "Mediamax / The Linkup is closing". The full post is included below.
The post states: "It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers."
I would imagine it is frustrating for all customers who have until 8 August to download any files that have not already been lost by this company or were deleted with little or no notice when the switchover to The Linkup began in April.
So far there is no indication of whether those of us paying annual subscriptions will receive a refund. Personally my last payment was in March 2008 and my hosted links have not worked since the switch over in April. This is despite the fact that Mr. John Hood, communications director, posted here on 4 July in response to me raising this: "His statement about the TLU supporting links is a half truth. Yes, there were issues with existing links but that's because they the files that were in users hosted section were some of the last to migrate. We OBVIOUSLY still support embedded links." My files turned up in The Linkup long ago, but still the hosted links don't work. My podcast has fallen silent (and I've given up on it for now in frustration, thanks John), as have other streams.
I first began a blog on Mediamax because of lack of response from customer support when files went missing en masse. Comments were disabled on the official blog, so the idea was people could leave their comments on the users blog instead. It was called: "Mediamax - we need you!" and was an appeal for the company to engage with customers and address the problems.
For a while there was some productive discussion, or so it seemed. But then the transfer to The Linkup was sprung on us, a system still in beta. Those with free accounts on Mediamax were told with a week's notice or no notice at all that their accounts would be closed and all files deleted.
The transfer was a disaster, with a scheduling tool quickly abandoned and the promise that our files would all be transferred by the company. But for many, files have still not appeared. We were told hosted links would be maintained until December 2008. Mine have never worked, despite John's claim that OBVIOUSLY they are supported.
The only good news was that the official The Linkup blog allowed comments and so this one fell silent as many of us left our reports of system failures and appeals for help there. It felt like we were talking into a void, however. Now the comments there have all been deleted.
So The Linkup will soon be no more. Hopefully the warning at the top of this blog suggesting those thinking of signing up to The Linkup wait to see if it resolves its problems will have saved some people their money and the heartbreak many posters here report as family photos and important documents they thought they had backed up are lost forever.
I am sure the closure of The Linkup was not the outcome most people on this blog wanted. We wanted clear communication, a working system and either lost files back or at least an admission that they were gone forever and some form of compensation. Waiving of fees for those of us who have forked out good money for nothing would have been nice.
It seems, however, that it is easier for The Linkup to dump its historic customers.
Perhaps those involved will resurface in another guise promising secure storage and many other things. As it has failed to deliver or honour these commitments in the past, I would be loathe to trust it again. We can have no confidence this team will not be as incompetent in future.
It may not only be the desire to escape historic commitments that has brought about the closure. As has been mentioned in comments here, people were finding the files of strangers turning up in their accounts. While the terms and conditions may protect the company from losing files, breaking the security of personal data is perhaps a more serious issue as it is regulated by legislation in many countries, including, no doubt, the US. Perhaps it is the real risk of customers finding their personal information being abused that has prompted the company to pull the plug.
It is sad to see that the company blames others instead of looking at its own failings. John Hood said he disabled comments on the official blog, not because he didn't want to respond to the comments, but because : "the blog was full of bickering between posters and people spreading half truths. to say there a lot of sharing of information is a joke." See:
http://thelinkupusers.blogspot.com/2008/07/john-hood-disabled-comments.html
In what he billed as his 'last post' just last Friday in a comment on that entry, there was a portent of the imminent closure as he attempted to blame me for running this blog: "My point here is that he's not trying to do anything constructive here. He's just here to try to bring TLU down." He falsely claimed I had never contacted the company. I have the emails to prove it and left comments on the official blog, though John has deleted those.
Mr. Hood wrote: "Don't hide under the pretense that you're trying to provide a forum where people can get information."
Well, it has been no pretense. I hope this blog and its predecessor has provided a useful service. Certainly there has been a lot of information sharing going on. You wouldn't know from the official blog that wayward files have been turning up in other people's accounts, for example. This blog may even help the owners to be found. The Mediamax blog had a series of very useful posting, in my opinion, such as sharing information on file recovery progress.
So farewell to The Linkup. Good luck for whatever your people do next - I sincerely hope it has nothing to do with file storage or customer service. Oh, and please, at the very least, refund our fees.
Here then is the posting from the official blog telling us our files are soon to be deleted forever. See:
a href="http://tlublog.blogspot.com/2008/07/mediamax-linkup-is-closing.html:
---
MediaMax / The Linkup is closing
We regret to inform you that we will be closing The Linkup service on Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.
The Linkup is no longer accepting any uploads or new accounts, and no further charges will be made to your credit card. After August 8, your account will not be accessible, all your personal information will be deleted (username, billing information, history, etc), and your files will be deleted. Please download any files that are in your account that you wish to keep before Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.
It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers.
We are very sorry that we have not been able to rebuild our service as we had envisioned. We sincerely appreciate those of you who stuck by us and held out hope for the return of a great service, and apologize that things did not work out better. And also a special thanks and apology to those developers who have been developing applications on The Linkup API that can no longer be supported.
Sincerely,
The Linkup Team
---
Those checking back to the official The Link Up blog for an update on the 29 June posting (which said the site was down for maintenance, though it was already back up), will have been shocked at the post today, 9 July 2008: "Mediamax / The Linkup is closing". The full post is included below.
The post states: "It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers."
I would imagine it is frustrating for all customers who have until 8 August to download any files that have not already been lost by this company or were deleted with little or no notice when the switchover to The Linkup began in April.
So far there is no indication of whether those of us paying annual subscriptions will receive a refund. Personally my last payment was in March 2008 and my hosted links have not worked since the switch over in April. This is despite the fact that Mr. John Hood, communications director, posted here on 4 July in response to me raising this: "His statement about the TLU supporting links is a half truth. Yes, there were issues with existing links but that's because they the files that were in users hosted section were some of the last to migrate. We OBVIOUSLY still support embedded links." My files turned up in The Linkup long ago, but still the hosted links don't work. My podcast has fallen silent (and I've given up on it for now in frustration, thanks John), as have other streams.
I first began a blog on Mediamax because of lack of response from customer support when files went missing en masse. Comments were disabled on the official blog, so the idea was people could leave their comments on the users blog instead. It was called: "Mediamax - we need you!" and was an appeal for the company to engage with customers and address the problems.
For a while there was some productive discussion, or so it seemed. But then the transfer to The Linkup was sprung on us, a system still in beta. Those with free accounts on Mediamax were told with a week's notice or no notice at all that their accounts would be closed and all files deleted.
The transfer was a disaster, with a scheduling tool quickly abandoned and the promise that our files would all be transferred by the company. But for many, files have still not appeared. We were told hosted links would be maintained until December 2008. Mine have never worked, despite John's claim that OBVIOUSLY they are supported.
The only good news was that the official The Linkup blog allowed comments and so this one fell silent as many of us left our reports of system failures and appeals for help there. It felt like we were talking into a void, however. Now the comments there have all been deleted.
So The Linkup will soon be no more. Hopefully the warning at the top of this blog suggesting those thinking of signing up to The Linkup wait to see if it resolves its problems will have saved some people their money and the heartbreak many posters here report as family photos and important documents they thought they had backed up are lost forever.
I am sure the closure of The Linkup was not the outcome most people on this blog wanted. We wanted clear communication, a working system and either lost files back or at least an admission that they were gone forever and some form of compensation. Waiving of fees for those of us who have forked out good money for nothing would have been nice.
It seems, however, that it is easier for The Linkup to dump its historic customers.
Perhaps those involved will resurface in another guise promising secure storage and many other things. As it has failed to deliver or honour these commitments in the past, I would be loathe to trust it again. We can have no confidence this team will not be as incompetent in future.
It may not only be the desire to escape historic commitments that has brought about the closure. As has been mentioned in comments here, people were finding the files of strangers turning up in their accounts. While the terms and conditions may protect the company from losing files, breaking the security of personal data is perhaps a more serious issue as it is regulated by legislation in many countries, including, no doubt, the US. Perhaps it is the real risk of customers finding their personal information being abused that has prompted the company to pull the plug.
It is sad to see that the company blames others instead of looking at its own failings. John Hood said he disabled comments on the official blog, not because he didn't want to respond to the comments, but because : "the blog was full of bickering between posters and people spreading half truths. to say there a lot of sharing of information is a joke." See:
http://thelinkupusers.blogspot.com/2008/07/john-hood-disabled-comments.html
In what he billed as his 'last post' just last Friday in a comment on that entry, there was a portent of the imminent closure as he attempted to blame me for running this blog: "My point here is that he's not trying to do anything constructive here. He's just here to try to bring TLU down." He falsely claimed I had never contacted the company. I have the emails to prove it and left comments on the official blog, though John has deleted those.
Mr. Hood wrote: "Don't hide under the pretense that you're trying to provide a forum where people can get information."
Well, it has been no pretense. I hope this blog and its predecessor has provided a useful service. Certainly there has been a lot of information sharing going on. You wouldn't know from the official blog that wayward files have been turning up in other people's accounts, for example. This blog may even help the owners to be found. The Mediamax blog had a series of very useful posting, in my opinion, such as sharing information on file recovery progress.
So farewell to The Linkup. Good luck for whatever your people do next - I sincerely hope it has nothing to do with file storage or customer service. Oh, and please, at the very least, refund our fees.
Here then is the posting from the official blog telling us our files are soon to be deleted forever. See:
a href="http://tlublog.blogspot.com/2008/07/mediamax-linkup-is-closing.html:
---
MediaMax / The Linkup is closing
We regret to inform you that we will be closing The Linkup service on Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.
The Linkup is no longer accepting any uploads or new accounts, and no further charges will be made to your credit card. After August 8, your account will not be accessible, all your personal information will be deleted (username, billing information, history, etc), and your files will be deleted. Please download any files that are in your account that you wish to keep before Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.
It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers.
We are very sorry that we have not been able to rebuild our service as we had envisioned. We sincerely appreciate those of you who stuck by us and held out hope for the return of a great service, and apologize that things did not work out better. And also a special thanks and apology to those developers who have been developing applications on The Linkup API that can no longer be supported.
Sincerely,
The Linkup Team
---
Game over man, game over.
Just picked this up from the TLU blog (http://tlublog.blogspot.com/) and it's visible if you have to login to the site as well.
[quote]
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
MediaMax / The Linkup is closing
We regret to inform you that we will be closing The Linkup service on Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.The Linkup is no longer accepting any uploads or new accounts, and no further charges will be made to your credit card. After August 8, your account will not be accessible, all your personal information will be deleted (username, billing information, history, etc), and your files will be deleted. Please download any files that are in your account that you wish to keep before Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers.We are very sorry that we have not been able to rebuild our service as we had envisioned. We sincerely appreciate those of you who stuck by us and held out hope for the return of a great service, and apologize that things did not work out better. And also a special thanks and apology to those developers who have been developing applications on The Linkup API that can no longer be supported.Sincerely,The Linkup Team
Posted by Team Linkup at 12:41 AM
[/quote]
Well, I suppose some people will be glad to see them finally go under. Personally I feel sad for the people, like me, that hoped they would pull through as we had so much invested in them that there really wasn't an alternative. For me it means the work of about 6 years of collecting nearly every anime / manga and Jdrama release and putting it on Streamload -> MediaMax - > TheLinkUp just went out of the window. Everything we have done to try and make it work is in the end all for nothing.
To me it looks they at first were a victim of their succes (Streamload) and when they tried to built a system that could continue to carry the load (MediaMax followed by TLU) they made some monumental bad decisions and plainly weren't up to the task at hand. This they coupled with an attitude of downplaying and stonewalling problems with an apology here and there to not alienate every customer they had. I had really hoped when they announced TLU and actually let their user participate in the development and testing that things would turn out alright in the end, but it seems that as with MediaMax, TLU, or rather the people behind it, have not been up to the task and were unable to give us what we wanted, needed and basically something that could be expected of a company that is supposed to deliver a good product.
To add injury to insult them cutting off the system at the mentioned date will mean a lot of users have paid for a subscription that was supposed to last longer then it now will and I didn't see a word about restituting at least some of subscription fees.
WillTRiker
[quote]
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
MediaMax / The Linkup is closing
We regret to inform you that we will be closing The Linkup service on Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.The Linkup is no longer accepting any uploads or new accounts, and no further charges will be made to your credit card. After August 8, your account will not be accessible, all your personal information will be deleted (username, billing information, history, etc), and your files will be deleted. Please download any files that are in your account that you wish to keep before Friday, August 8 at 5:00 pm PDT.It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers.We are very sorry that we have not been able to rebuild our service as we had envisioned. We sincerely appreciate those of you who stuck by us and held out hope for the return of a great service, and apologize that things did not work out better. And also a special thanks and apology to those developers who have been developing applications on The Linkup API that can no longer be supported.Sincerely,The Linkup Team
Posted by Team Linkup at 12:41 AM
[/quote]
Well, I suppose some people will be glad to see them finally go under. Personally I feel sad for the people, like me, that hoped they would pull through as we had so much invested in them that there really wasn't an alternative. For me it means the work of about 6 years of collecting nearly every anime / manga and Jdrama release and putting it on Streamload -> MediaMax - > TheLinkUp just went out of the window. Everything we have done to try and make it work is in the end all for nothing.
To me it looks they at first were a victim of their succes (Streamload) and when they tried to built a system that could continue to carry the load (MediaMax followed by TLU) they made some monumental bad decisions and plainly weren't up to the task at hand. This they coupled with an attitude of downplaying and stonewalling problems with an apology here and there to not alienate every customer they had. I had really hoped when they announced TLU and actually let their user participate in the development and testing that things would turn out alright in the end, but it seems that as with MediaMax, TLU, or rather the people behind it, have not been up to the task and were unable to give us what we wanted, needed and basically something that could be expected of a company that is supposed to deliver a good product.
To add injury to insult them cutting off the system at the mentioned date will mean a lot of users have paid for a subscription that was supposed to last longer then it now will and I didn't see a word about restituting at least some of subscription fees.
WillTRiker
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Linkup poll
What do you think of the change over to The Linkup?
Vote in the poll on the new unofficial blog for Linkup users at:
http://thelinkupusers.blogspot.com/
Vote in the poll on the new unofficial blog for Linkup users at:
http://thelinkupusers.blogspot.com/
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Leave your comments on The Linkup blog
Well MediaMax is now dead and The Linkup, if not properly live, is certainly touting for business.
It bills itself as: "The best place to store and share files on the web."
Maybe if 'store' is taken to mean 'upload with a risk of losing forever and the possibility of having your free account closed down and all files dumped with just a week's notice', which is the service MediaMax provided.
And 'share' has to mean 'share until we decide to change the name to escape our piss poor image in which case links to you files will die when we can no longer be bothered to redirect them'.
One positive development is The Linkup blog accepts comments. So leave them at:
http://tlublog.blogspot.com/
If comments are disabled there, you can use the unofficial blog at:
http://thelinkupusers.blogspot.com/
This blog will remain as a historic record of how MediaMax delivered on its claim to be the best file storage and sharing service.
It bills itself as: "The best place to store and share files on the web."
Maybe if 'store' is taken to mean 'upload with a risk of losing forever and the possibility of having your free account closed down and all files dumped with just a week's notice', which is the service MediaMax provided.
And 'share' has to mean 'share until we decide to change the name to escape our piss poor image in which case links to you files will die when we can no longer be bothered to redirect them'.
One positive development is The Linkup blog accepts comments. So leave them at:
http://tlublog.blogspot.com/
If comments are disabled there, you can use the unofficial blog at:
http://thelinkupusers.blogspot.com/
This blog will remain as a historic record of how MediaMax delivered on its claim to be the best file storage and sharing service.
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