The situation regarding the cloud is frustrating. We all know this. Murena is a startup. This can’t come as a surprise to anyone! Investing in startups is always associated with a certain level of risk. When investing in a startup you should never invest more than you’re prepared to lose, this is page 1 in the manual.
I see a lot of people on the board using big, derogatory words, without having done the above, simple homework on their own.
As in all other cases where a startup is facing issues the only constructive thing to ask is: Do I still believe the project to be worth investing in? If yes, please keep supporting the project. If no, please accept that you put yourself on thin ice, investing more than you could afford to lose, and please, please stop bickering on the board about what is ultimately your own mistake.
Also, one backup is no baclup. If you loose data because of the failure of your cloud storage, albeit a real frustrating pain, you should think again about how you preserve your data. Local hard drives are cheap and available, and nextcloud makes it easy to backup to your own computer.
When I see the long and self justified posts of some user about trust and the supposed incompetence of murena, I cannot refrain from thinking one should try a bit harder to have better digital habits before being so aggressive in their demands.
I must confess not to have made up my mind how to judge the Murena.io downtime…
I have however read a (quite hard) saying regarding cloud backups:
If a cloud storage provider loses my data, it is his fault. If I lose data because of a cloud storage provider, it is my fault.
There are several guides on the internet to find your best backup strategy. There is for instance the “3-2-1” rule for your important data: 3 backups on 2 different media (e.g. hard drive & cloud), 1 backup off-site, i.e., at another place (can be cloud, or a hard drive at your parent’s house).
EDIT: I think that I have read somewhere that the 3-2-1 rule is somehow outdated… Still, I would not consider it to be a bad idea.
Fair enough! I still have high hopes, as I do not see murena as a cloud provider, but as a company destined to make privacy accessible to all non-technical people.
Privacy friendly cloud is only a part of what we need, and not even the main one. If a private cloud is needed, I would recommend proton drive and not murena.
If proton fails in the same way murena did, I would be pretty pissed off too, I’ll admit.
Your logic is flawed as Murena is just a business like any other player on the market offering goods like smartphones and services like cloud storage. Doing a contract with them has nothing to do with investing in a startup, and demanding answers for failed contracts is totally fair.
As much as Murena is a startup, I was hoping the other language used in their advertisements about not being like Big Tech also means not doing the things that startups that aspire to become Big Tech do, which is accumulate a mess of maintenance debt and then the people who pay the price are the customers.
There’s been a lack of transparency so I can only assume this, but my guess is that they have taken some shortcuts with their infrastructure and now the recovery is taking way longer and being more complicated than it should be.
A toxically positive attitude of “well you just have to accept it because it’s a startup” just lets Murena off the hook for making bad decisions. We can and should criticize the fact this service has been set up with seemingly little attention put towards the logistics for proper support. Respectfully, of course, and understanding that nothing is ever perfect. But we’ve been given very little details on what happened and why it happened, and what is being done to prevent this in the future. That is not how you build trust with people, startup company or not.
By now, however, it should be evident, that complaining on the boards is futile. If you wanna show your dissatisfaction, stop investing, and maybe even send them an email telling them why (in case you believe them too dense to have picked up on this already), but please stop whining in here, its getting old.
I only visit to check on the outage thread, but most complaints I’ve seen are responded to by 3 or 4 people saying that they personally are not affected and that Murena could do no wrong and that the people upset and complaining are wrong for complaining because Murena is a small company.
I agree complaining doesn’t accomplish anything, but I assure you telling people to stop will be equally as futile.
Just to add that this is a very special circumstance, because Murena’s product they are selling (or wanting us to invest into) is the idea of having your data in a protected cloud environment. I mean “protected” primarily against a big tech player, typically the one hosting the services themself.
“Normally” the technical solution shouldn’t require trust, as it stands on its own. Because of this, /e/OS is so amazing; it’s open source, based on LineageOS with a lot of comfort modifications for ease of use. And this is a really awesome thing, and I wouldn’t want that to go away even if that means I swallow the bad pill with an unreliable cloud service.
Murena Cloud is a different story, its technical implementation is lackluster, it has more service interruptions, downtimes, and outright dangerous bugs (I recall the bug, where users could access other peoples files at random), and the user data is propably not encrypted to a point where it is secured against themself or a third actor. BUT in my opinion it was still a somewhat better deal for me in terms of privacy as my most concerning threat vector is Google. In short: I trusted Murena more than Google.
But this outtage, how long it is going and how amateurish the handling and the communication is, proofs to me, that all the small technical problems culminating in a massive outtage of all cloud services, that there is a bigger problem than just a series of unlucky errors. This is a long series of bad decisions and accumulating a lot of technical dept and outsourcing the risk to all Murena users. Not reviewing openly what and why things went wrong guarantees, this will happen again with potentially more damage (i.e malware infection and stolen credentials).
In short: My trust in Murena services is shattered, and now they need to prove me, they can regain their trustworthiness through a BRILLANT Post Mortem and a really great plan for the future everybody can support. I want them to succeeed and I want to support Murena; I just don’t want them to f up my data, for this I could just stay with google and have better uptimes.
Personally I don’t even need cloud backup of my data files. I am happy to connect my phone to a PC and save my data (mostly photos) to a hard drive or USB stick.
What I do like is the email service, notes, tasks and contacts. I would be fine without 1GB storage (I actually have 20GB because of donation) but I can live without it.
I purposely remove Microsoft Onedrive from my PC and don’t use it in Hotmail unless I need to transfer a large file, but there are other methods to do this.
I don’t know why we even need cloud storage in the first place, didn’t have it 15 years (give or take) and we were fine. Take care of your own data…
That you personally don’t use it doesn’t magically make it so other users don’t and don’t prefer it to other solutions for a myriad reasons. Off the top of my head, every professional backup system recommends keeping an offsite copy of data. Another reason is you can lose a USB stick or an external hard drive. You can lose access to the cloud as well, as we’ve seen, but some people struggle with not losing physical things. You travel a lot and don’t want to bring external hard drives with you to minimize luggage. It’s way cheaper to pay for a large amount of relatively fast cloud storage that you can access on any device than it is to buy a large and fast external hard drive which you might not even be able to plug into some devices. I could go on…
The point is, saying “well I don’t have an issue so I don’t see why anyone else would” is silly. Unless you can invent a time machine and give all the users who have lost data a physical backup device and warn them about losing access to the Murena cloud it adds nothing to the conversation.
This, a thousand times.
Instead we get a few scarce replies on this forum, zero transparent communication, and a bunch of people who insist that /e/OS is free and we should be thankful, that Murena is a startup, that they are allowed to make mistakes, and so on.
But e/os/ is free, the fact that one has bought a 399 bucks e/os/ smartphone does not entitle someone to demand anything.
Unless one is a cloud paying customer, e/OS/ and cloud are free, that is the point that has been made by a few users (me included)
One can complain (rightly) about many things but writing “I purchased a e/os/ phone I require that the situation be fixed immediately” is not the way to go.
The cloud storage offered by Murena should be a paid service. This way they will have a revenue stream to keep thing like servers and storage up. The bits that make this up are not free along with the electricity and the staff to operate them. Murena only mistake is not charging for the cloud services from the beginning. (I know they now offer this service).
I get that they don’t want to be a Google or Microsoft or a Bad Apple either and they are not that. The eOS is evidence they are not the aforementioned.
