CrashPlan Fail - you still can't remove an account

Rule #1 of Gordon's Laws for Cloud Services:

Is it obvious how to delete your account and all data and services?

This rule is always important, but it's critically important for a Cloud backup service. Do you really want to forget or lose control of a complete backup of all your unencrypted data?

CrashPlan failed this test, and others, seven months ago. Back then, during a trial period, I had my backup data on their servers. Their FAQ then didn't describe how to delete it.

I was later told you could delete it by logging in to the CrashPlan account web site, then choosing CrashPlan Central -> Destinations>Online, then selecting "Remove Backup Destination". There was no way to remove an account however.

Today I checked. My account still remains, but now that the trial period ended I don't see an option to remove my data from their servers. Perhaps the data is gone, or maybe if I paid up I'd see it reappear. I wouldn't be surprised by either option.

There's still no way to remove an account from the web site. I also noticed that "My Profile" includes "Receive promotional emails from CrashPlan.com". Hell freezes over the day I opt-in to promotional emails, so that was a sneak play.

CrashPlan is on course to crash landing. When they go into receivership their creditors will own your data. Creditors who need to recover some of their losses.

Update: See comments from CrashPlan. They tell me the data is likely overwritten, and is not recoverable after the promotional period ends. They have no plans at this time for an account removal feature, that requires email (seems a risky practice). Maybe that will change. Comments underscored the importance of client-side encryption.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: After the Google Hack: Life in the transparent society

VMware Virtual Machines - the backup problem

It's times like this that I really miss Byte (or BYTE?) magazine. They would have had great coverage of VMWare VMs - how they work, and what the risks are. Now that's specialist knowledge. Knowledge that, when I use Google, is obscured by a haze of marketing material.

The best we non-specialists can do is share our limited experience in blog posts, like this one sharing my experience with VM backup. That's been a problem for me.

First - my experience. I've used VMWare Fusion on my Macs for a few years. I need it less than once a month, typically to launch XPSP4 and run Access or (yech) Quicken. On the other hand, I configured and use a VMWare Workstation on a 64bit Win7 machine at work. That VM is running a Windows 2003 Server environment with terminal server and I use it very frequently.

Both my Fusion and Workstation VMs are configured to store the VM data as many files rather than a single monolithic file. Both are about 80-100 GB in size and store as little of my data as possible; on the Mac the individual .vmdk files vary in size from about 200 to 500 MB. I don't have the Workstation VM at hand but I think its files are all a fixed size.

The host OS X machine is backed up using Time Capsule (sigh) and SuperDuper! (sigh). Neither give me the warm fuzzies of Retrospect at its best. The Windows 7 machine is backed up using (Dantz -> EMC -> Roxio) Retrospect Professional.

I configured both VMs to use multiple files because of the VM backup problem I knew about.

The obvious backup problem for these machines is that if you configure a VM as one monolithic file, then every time you touch it the host system backup software has to backup a 100GB backup event. That will overload Time Machine (Capsule) or Retrospect pretty quickly. (More sophisticated backup software can manage this differently, but I don't think TM or Retrospect can.)

That's why I went with separate files. Backups would only have to manage the files that changed. (Ahh, but how does the backup software know what's changed - esp. if the files are a fixed size?)

I think that approach does work when the VM is shut down. I think it works on my Mac. It doesn't work with Retrospect Professional on the Windows 7 machine where our VM is always running.

I learned that the hard way when we tried to do a restore. The restored VM seemed good at first, but it was soon clear that we'd somehow ended up with different time slices. We had to kill the VM. Fortunately, because I'm justifiably paranoid about backup, we also had a file system backup that was only a few weeks old. Since we don't keep data on the VM we lost very little.

This is a nasty problem. As best I can tell, at least on Windows, Retrospect Professional can't do a reliable backup of a running multi-file VMWare VM. The limited VMWare marketing material I could find suggests this isn't just a Retrospect problem. The solution is, of course, to buy their costly backup software. You can also do backup from within the client OS, but that adds a new level of cost and complexity to overall backup. Retrospect Professional, for example, won't install on Windows 2003 server. For that you need their much more costly server backup.

Now you know what I know. If you know any more, or can point me to anything that's not marketing material, I'd be grateful.

I do miss Byte.

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Transferring the mnspecialhockey.org domain - what remains of Google Apps

The last step of the mnspecialhockey.org migration took place at DreamHost. The provide an optional mixed hosting service. I had some files in a traditional ftp site on a DH server, but also Gmail and Google Apps via Google.

From their control panel I turned off the Gmail and Google Apps connection. (See the posts list below for my prior action).

Then, since DH was also the registrar for mnspecialhockey.org I switched to the new DNS servers. I'll update this post if I learn what really happens to the data that was at the old site.

See also (note, some are old)!

• Closing a Google Apps domain: document liberation and more 2010
• Closing a Google Apps project: downloading sites 2010
• Transferring a Google Apps eNom domain: Awkward!
• How to create a google apps custom domain and move your blogger blogs to your new domain (2007)
• Gordon's Tech: Migrating a domain with related Google Apps and hosting files to a new service (2008). How I configured mnspecialhockey.org Google Apps after moving from Lunarpages.
• Gordon's Tech: Google Apps: Configuration for a non-Google managed domain (2007) - original mnspecialhockey.org Google Apps

Update 8/29/10: After the transfer

The mnspecialhockey.org domain now points to a new site. What happened to the old content?

• sites: they still exist! The URLs are of the form: http://sites.google.com/a/mnspecialhockey.org/sites/system/app/pages/meta/dashboard 
• docs: they still exist! The URL is of the form: http://docs.google.com/a/mnspecialhockey.org/#all
• mail: it still exists for my account (I removed the others) with URL: http://mail.google.com/a/mnspecialhockey.org/?tab=om#inbox

In fact, I can still manage the domain using the URL

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/mnspecialhockey.org/Dashboard

So I have, at least for the moment, answered the question about what happens to Google Apps content when the original Google App Domain is gone. Turns out, it persists. Even the Domain settings persist (Google Apps thinks the domain is still mnspecialhockey.org, even though it no longer references this site).

If this remains true, it shows there's only a loose coupling between a domain-associated Google Apps suite and the domain itself. 

That's rather nice to know. It's not completely surprising however.

Closing a Google Apps domain: document liberation and more

I'm closing down a Google Apps domain because the domain name is moving (donated) to a new owner. Since I don't know what happens to the data after I transfer the domain name I've so far:

• Exported the "Sites" pages using a Data Liberation Tool
• Deleted all the existing site user accounts

My next step is to get a local copy of all the documents. Again, the DLF has directions. This turns out to be built into the Docs framework. On export you can specify a file format, I chose RTF for documents, Excel for spreadsheets, and native for the rest (PDF).

I also made sure so share all the documents with my personal account, but I wasn't able to transfer ownership. Currently that's not supported in Google Apps.

We had the non-profit version of Google Apps (free from Google) so we had all the yummy pro features, like the ability to associated a secondary domain. I have some I could use and I considered doing that to provide a way to access data post transfer, but I decided to skip that step in the interests of time.

Closing a Google Apps project: downloading sites

When MN Special Hockey signed up with a web hosting project, I needed to transfer the domain.

The domain was managed through my Dreamhost (love 'em - click here to evaluate my discount on their ISP services) accounts. There it has associated Google Apps services. I really didn't know what would happen to the account data when I switched away the host name, so I decided to see what I could backup.

Naturally I turned to Google's Data Liberation Front - my heroes. They provide a Java app for this purpose. It can allegedly be used to move a site from one location to another! 

Sites - the Data Liberation Front

A site can be downloaded using the open-source tool available at the Google Sites Liberation Project Page. Note that this tool requires Java 1.5 or later. Once the tool has been downloaded, double-click on the JAR file to launch the application. 

It opened easily on OS X 10.6.

You will need the documentation. Instead of www.mnspecialhockey.org (didn't fit their model) I tried sites.mnspecialhockey.org and I found two sites to copy:

• http://sites.google.com/a/mnspecialhockey.org/www/
• http://sites.google.com/a/mnspecialhockey.org/mn-special-hockey-site/

From their documentation I think the values are:

• host: sites.google.com (optional)
• domain: mnspecialhockey.org (optional)
• webspace: www and mn-special-hockey-site (two webspaces)

There's an option to download revisions, but I didn't care about that. I was fine with the latest version.

It worked, but the result was not pretty! Without style sheets it renders poorly in Safari, and  some of the character encoding was off. Still, the bulk of the content was there including associated PDFs that were a part of the site.

The Java app is pretty simple. You have to quit and restart to do a second site. Still, did I mention it worked?

The language hole in Blogger's comment spam filtering

This comment evaded Blogger's comment spam filters ....

На нашем Видео каталоге вы можете Посмотреть Видеосюжеты, захотите на Простой видео сайт

It contained an embedded link.

The language is Russian [1]. Google translate gives us ...

On our video directory, you can watch video projects, you want for a simple video site

Blogger needs to treat non-blog-language posts as spam, or at least require review with auto-translation to the native language. This one should have been caught.

If I get another one like this (presumably later today) I'll have to turn on authenticated commenting until Google catches up.

[1] Why would anyone bother to post spam in a language that cannot be read? Well, for one thing, Google's search engine can "read" the link, and so the source gets link kharma. It's also a way to find vulnerable blog targets to further exploit. I'm sure there are other benefits, such as very foolish people curiously clicking on the link; those people likely have vulnerable machines that are easy to pawn.

Cautionary tale about Google Apps for business

Bad outcome with using free Google Apps for business operations.

A few quick comments:

• Dreamhost is the best way to use free Google App. They give you document hosting, domain registration and control, support and service, and associated Google Apps. (see my kickback deal with promo code KATEVA). I use 'em, I like 'em. Unusual company.
• The connection between Google Apps and domain name is tenuous. App content and services will survive domain divorce.
• Gmail has the same problem. So do all Google services, including identity management. There is no support. That scares me.
• Google Apps pricing is a great deal for a school or even a modest business, but it scales oddly and it's too much for a paid Google Apps family account. I'd like to see Google offer more price/service options.