I think it’s time to say goodbye to Murena. I can’t imagine that in the future people will pay money for a service from a company that is still dysfunctional after a month of downtime.
I also can’t imagine anyone buying another smartphone for a lot of money from a company that does such a poor job of securing the data of paying customers.
And since no company can survive on people installing an OS that is provided free of charge, I don’t see any conceivable future scenario for Murena.
As you can see, it doesn’t even make sense to keep asking questions and demanding better communication for weeks on end: There is no good news!
I think Murena is doing a good job in having most things running.
Data restore is delicate and time consuming bot in pretest, execution and verification.
Nextcloud sever is… what it is. Impressive and massive, and of course full of possible pitholes.
Dumping back data on an active user (other service) must be delicate!
3 Likes
Data recovery must have the highest priority! If it takes time, then it takes time!
Does the outage affect the calendar’s private link?
For some time now, it seems the private link no longer works. Is that a separate problem or is this also related to teh outage?
Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/OS the deGoogled mobile OS and online services
1 Like
Data security and data availability has an higher priority.
I believe that this post from @ben24 deserves an official response from Murena/ e Foundation. Since it is headquartered in Paris, the GDPR applies. I suppose it could be argued though, that the loss of personal data (which would constitute a breach) is not yet confirmed, it may still be recovered. I’m not a legal expert.
From what I understand unless the rights and freedoms of the users are at risk then gdpr doesn’t apply here.
UK gdpr even has this example
A university experiences a breach when a member of staff accidentally deletes a record of alumni contact details. The details are later re-created from a backup. This is unlikely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of those individuals. They don’t need to be informed about the breach.
1 Like
Though the linked article does not specifically mention unavailability of data and is more to do with data breach, we have made the declaration all the same.
1 Like
No reply so far. @GaelDuval and @Manoj If you delete my data without giving me access to it to download it, this will have consequences, I swear!
is threatening. Leaving it vague enough to imply that you may hurt someone is a threat, for sure. If you mean legal consequences, say so.
Imagine being the position of a team undergoing such a community firestorm, hearing an enraged customer tell you that they’re gonna do something if you get them mad enough.
I obviousy did not threaten anyone personally with consequences but the organization
Is it obvious? Did you not directly tag Gael Duval and Manoj in that same sentence? Perhaps you misspelled “murena” or “e foundation,” in which case I think you could edit that.
10 Likes
Thanks for the hint. I couldn’t find a way to edit the post as you suggested so I deleted it.
2 Likes
Another question about the notes: My notes are still available in the Notes app. Unfortunately, the app does not offer a backup option, at least I can’t find anything about it.
Does anyone know if it is somehow possible to extract the notes? Just in case restoring the cloud doesn’t work after all.
They are basically simple text files, so it must be possible to find them on the smartphone somehow?!
I notice that since this started there has been no updates of any sort, I am wondering if privacy and/or security are being compromised?
As with so many here I find it disappointing that the recovery is taking so long. When the failure happened, I was coming to the end of a year of assessing the Murena and /e/OS ecosystem. In early 2024, I bought two Murena phones and paid for a small amount of cloud space. I was waiting for a year to pass before copying any substantial personal data to the Murena Cloud.
I have recently renewed my annual cloud subscription because I support the mission of Murena. I am prepared to risk 30-40 euros as a way of supporting the project for another year.
I do want to ask @GaelDuval to consider a few points when he has a break from managing the emergency response. What would restore my trust in Murena is if they would do the following:
- Fully recover the system before the end of November.
- Share with users a full account of what went wrong.
- Share with users details of how Murena will mitigate future failure.
- Assure users that the new resilience plan has been independently audited.
- Give us a Service Level guarantee.
For me points 3 to 5 are essential. If Murena could address these points, then I would not only renew my subscription in late 2025, but take out a larger cloud plan to offer even more support.
I want Murena to succeed. We who want to be autonomous of US big tech need alternatives. They must be reliable.
I will stay with Murena for another year. @GaelDuval: please give us a report and an independently audited resilience plan as soon you can.
5 Likes
This I can relate and support. I donated a (to me) significant amount of money to the project in early stages. I convinced a large group of people including my family to use Murena-Phones and use the cloud. We rely on the service. However I have doubt if the whole system of phones/cloud-Storage/workspace would work for us in the future.
Being constructive, what we can do about files backup in future, is to run nextcloud sync client to a local machine, set client to not use virtual files (so they really get downloaded), and also use the option to move deleted files to trashbin (in case old backup get restored on server or files by other means go missing)
(Learned already before this incident: I have had another Nextcloud supplier who went down, and an own instance i failed keeping up. Actually my phone sync using Syncthing to my workstation, and workstation is/was syncing with Murena)
I believe in the project mission and goals, have paid service, and bought shares a couple months ago.
Keeping this project running with free accounts and no ad revenue is exhausting.
(Other big player use lots of ad income and income from selling data, you know).
I think the free accounts should be more limited, and we need to pay for quality.
Maybe add another lever of premium support, with better reliability and truly verified always working disaster recovery, possibly with backdoor to backups to user directly IIRC Nextcloud stored filer per user in separate directories, should not bee too hard to make secure access to stored file backups through some i.e sftp fileserver, if it is planned into that system.
1 Like
I am in full agreement with @molej on being constructive. I hope what I write below will be read as constructive (to be fully transparent, I should say that I own a small tranche of shares in Murena) …
What I do not understand (and I am not a network storage engineer) about this incident is all the talk of buying new hardware and waiting for it to be installed.
For a paid cloud service, should the user data not be mirrored in a second data centre, and should both data centres not have their own backup? I really struggle to understand how disk failures could lead to such a long outage. If the data was mirrored at a second location, then why would disc failures at one location be so catastrophic?
The Murena site says that “All servers hosted in Europe. All of our email and cloud servers are located in Finland” .
My questions then: Are the servers located in only one data centre in Finland? Is geo-redundancy not important? For those of us willing to pay for Murena Cloud, it would be helpful to know more about how our data is secured.
But as I say, I am not a network engineer. After the recovery, I hope Murena shares with users the kind of plain language explanation of backup and redundancy that we see from other independent cloud providers based in the UK and EU.
3 Likes
have you tried to simply sync your phone-notes with another nextcloud-instance?
doing the same with a local computer should make the files available on the computer.
Excellent put @Radalf07. It goes without saying that trust in a stable platform is an absolute requirement. I also want Murena to survive and prosper. After all the development team has done a absolute fantastic job.
However, the organization needs to be transparent, otherwise we will lose confidence.
I don’t know how to do this. When I want to add another account in the notes app, I get the message that you can only add ONE murena account.
1 Like
Choose one or more notes in the notes overview by pressing longer on it/them.
Then press the 3 dots in the upper right corner. Choose ‘move’ (verschieben). in my case there is the option to move them to ‘local’. Afterwards they must be somewhere in your device-storage.
I used another way: i choosed several notes and pressed the ‘share’ button. Then i pressed on ‘mail’ and the plain (!) text was saved in a mail.
1 Like