Service Outage Announcement: 7 Oct 2024

Update from Gael:

Update Dec 6th

This week’s update:

  1. Second attempt has been made on Monday, but didn’t succeed. Then we faced additional delays from the consulting company that is helping us on the recovery. They recommended a software upgrade that we did on Wednesday to solve the issue. Unfortunately that forced us to schedule and prepare a new full scan, which has started today morning. It is expected to run for ~5 days. Then we will make a new attempt to access the filesystem.
  2. Backup restoration is not fully complete yet unfortunately. On Dec 16th, we will start to send individual download links to available backups archives to users.

ETA for full service restoration cannot be given yet.

How bad is it? - Yes

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I think that after 2 months hardly anyone can expect to get the data back. Unfortunately, this is by far the worst thing that can happen to a company that offers cloud storage.

Arguably, and without playing down this current debacle, nobody getting your data is still a little bit better than random other users getting your data (*) (**).

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If I have all my data on my phone still, (notes, pictures being the major ones), is there anything I would lose if I walked away?

I love the idea of /e/os and during thenoutage I have watched from the sidelines quietly but I need to move on. There are other /e/os like OS that I have been looking into and I’ll just host the data myself

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I would judge e/OS/ and the Murena Services differently. As it’s now unresponsibly to further rely on Murena services, I migrated everything to other services. e/OS/ on itself had no similar f* up outside of the usual LineagoOS hickups.

So imho the most cost effective way to get through as an enduser is just to stay on e/OS/ but remove all of the Murena sync settings and look for another Nextcloud (maybe selfhosted) or similar 3rd party service and wait if the bad management decisions seep through to e/OS/ development.

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I have been very happy about my Murena phone. I bought it from e.foundation and I have donated a small sum couple of times. I think the e.foundation project is very important. I hope eOS will continue to grow and get more users. It must be very frustrating if one has been using cloud services, and now it’s not working. In the past I have used UbuntuOne and Wuala, which both shut down their services. Shutting down was managed very well, but still it was very frustrating. I moved to use Tresorit and some time after left for other reasons. Later Tresorit was bought by Swiss Post, a company owned by a government. If I hadn’t left Tresorit before, I would have left by then. With all the respect to aforementioned and my personal experience while working in some archives, I have developed (maybe sometimes an offending and not always the most practical) habit of trusting only my own multiple backups. I’m just saying… Accidents do happen. Couple of months service break might be the record though. But honestly, e.foundation, in general, is on the right tracks. Innit…?

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That situation after 2 months is really bad indeed. In my personal case I don’t need to retrieve the data that were stored on eCloud as I have them on another backup. I suspect many users are in my situation.

@ Murena team: have you considered conducting a survey of which users need to actually retrieve their data? And then go down the road of backup restoration only for these users and just reopen a new cloud for the others?

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Cannot believe how we, your customers, are treated.

It is more likely that there is no real backup and what Gael is talkin about is data from the dysfunctional storage cluster painfully restored from RAIDs in different states of missing spare drives. Some irrecoverable, and some only partially and some completely unrecoverably.

If there would have been a working real backup on tapes or separate storages, the most efficient way to recover would just be to start from scrath without user’s eDrive data and make the data available separatly as it’s restored while having a running service as fast as possible.

There is still no ETA at the start of month 3. With every day passed the propability increases that the data is irrecoverable.

Imho Murena can scrap it. If you have a local copy, the murena data is so much out of sync, the cloud data is pretty much useless. And if you were unlucky to only have the data on the cloud, you had to come up with solutions to recover from the missing data. The longer it takes, the more useless a backup becomes. And we are past the point 99% of murena users would have a use for that data.

And what makes me angry is to just get breadcrumps of informations every friday with no ETA and with no progress. The situation has not changed since 1 month ago.

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Thank you for interesting post and I agree with your sentiment & approach of backups. It is my data, and only myself can be best guardian of my data. Cloud is ultimate convenience, but has its own risks we see.

I genuinely feel bad & understand pain for those who lost data & time.

Am also hopeful e/OS/ does very, very well, because it’s truly a fantastic product in my opinion and we need these alternatives to big, deep pocket spying tech companies to flourish, even as they may have much more limited budgets and have growing pains.

Wishing for best for all here.

Hi, as announced on 25th Oct, the image server should be back in operation. But for legacy devices like Samsung A5 2017 or A5 2016 the image link directs to not found page for me:

Not Found
The requested resource was not found on this server.

Did I miss something?

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Hi everyone commenting,
I am wondering as much you are.

“What’s really going on?”
“I care about getting my data back and good communication.”
“Cannot believe how we, your customers, are treated.”
“And what makes me angry is to just get breadcrumps of informations…”
“…they must dare to say that the rocket exploded in flight.”
“Waw, so much love after two months of service outage!”

Hmm, I don´t really know what to think. Considering the ethos of e.foundation and /e/OS Murena, strange thing is the lack of transparency. All I can think, there could be some unknown legal issues that bind and restrict the communication? All seemed to go well until October, especially the fundraising included. I hope it is not the rocket, and if not love, I hope some kind of sympathy would continue towards the whole project. Lots of people would really really need it.

Hi, after 2 months, I need to get back my data. I paid for the service (because I didn’t want to put my data in Google server). Now I know I made a mistake.

But can you answer to a simple question? Can you give me back my data?
only anwser that, no affect.
Perhaps it’s the end of murena commercial project but in fact you have to answer to this simple question. I pay for a service you can’t deliver obviously.
2 month… I think I wait enough so tell everybody you loose data or tell why you can’t restaure or when I ll have my data back.

Simple no angry only fact and date.

We have shared the date of 16 Dec when we would start sending out emails links for users to download their data.

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It seems lots of users haven’t got enough information of why they don’t have still access to their data, neither when they do. Seems understanding “what’s going on” was missing. Me included. I don’t have too much data on my free cloud, just calendar, which have been easy to back up with Thunderbird. The reason why I didn’t need badly to know. But I can see many have. I was just happy my phone worked fine. Thank you for that. Now when trying to find the original posts after seeing Manoj’s link, I understand, that I would not have found them from under " Development and Testing Updates". If I would have been responsible for the crisis communication, I would have put all the outage info on the Community page, up on the front, hard to miss, in human readable form, in plain english also for non-indigenous english speakers. And would have sent personal emails to customers who have secondary emails registered. In my opinion, seems obvious, there was outage of understandable communication too.

Ok I’ve missed the 16th december date. But I understand in your answer that I ll have to download my data, Murena will not maintain this type of services anymore? Do murena pay back for people (like me) who pay for one year? In mail from murena I have no information at all, I think customers doesn’t have to dig in forum to know this kind of information.

I understand they will reopen a new, blank, cloud storage service and provide on the side a download link for those who need to retrieve data that were stored on the failed storage

Then I would like to know the decision making process which led to this.

Because this decision could have been made after week 1, or at the very latest after the failed first attempt to stabilize the cluster some weeks ago. I don’t understand why this was decided only last week prior to the indirect announcement, that user data will be offered separatly via download link. Which obviously is also not a sure thing and I only believe it after i got the link.

Also I would like to know the timestamp from that backup.

I would like to mention it in post ~#400 for the sake of completeness: The situation seems fubar
;- )

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