We are happy to announce the first phase of our partnership with ClickOVA to provide mobile backup services!
If you already have an Allmydata account (register or login here), you can now install the ClickOVA backup agent on your mobile phone and have it automatically back your contacts, pictures, and other information to the Allmydata service. This is great if you lose your phone or want to browse your files remotely, or want to share them later.
Have fun!
Peter
November 6th, 2008
Hi all,
Just a couple small but nice updates to the webdrive.
- Back and forward navigation buttons to help when browsing directories
- Icons for .xlsx, .pptx, and other new Office formats
- Smoother upload progress so that it’s easy to view the speed and overall progress
Hope these are useful!
Peter
October 30th, 2008
Hi all,
We are excited to announce our new pricing model effective immediately for all new accounts. The price per month will be $9.99/month (billed yearly) with a 30-day free trial period. You can cancel at any time during the first 30 days with no charge, and any time after that you will be refunded for the time not used. Our service has started to be quite successful and there is so much data being stored that the average usage is higher than our model accounted for. In order for us to not lose money on each customer, we need to get our margins up to cover costs and future development needs.
What about old accounts? All paid accounts are good for another year at their old rates, and free accounts have 3 months to upgrade to a paid account. If you have any transition questions, just let us know!
Thanks,
Peter
October 16th, 2008
Hi all,
Just a quick update on some recent activities. We added a couple features to the website, including a fallback method to upload files if Flash9 is not installed or working in your browser, some better metrics on upload speed, and a bit of cleanup of the interface when uploading lots of files.
We’re also steadily approaching a 64bit Vista build and should have a test version of that ready in the next couple weeks.
Last, I’d like to offer up access to our alpha FTP service (new, not fully tested, may be taken up/down without warning, but it’s fast!). Remember - like all standard FTP services, all data is passed in the clear. We will be addressing this by implementing secure FTP, but that is still in the works. You can use your standard login/pass at prodftp.allmydata.com . Note that there is a problem with the “@” character when trying to mount an FTP site in Mac Finder, so you can get around this by logging into the website and changing your email address to a username. Note this will prevent us from sending you emails, but you can try out the Mac FTP drive. Windows seems to work reasonably well, and command line access is very quick. Let us know your thoughts!
October 13th, 2008
Hi all,
Allmydata 3.1.2 with improved backup speed is now available for download by the public. Also, please try out our new web browser features that includes a media player with audio and full-screen video for many formats!
Allmydata provides secure, unlimited backup, storage, and sharing for your important files. We currently provide Windows and web-based clients.
The main features of this point release are:
- Faster backup - the Allmydata client now maintains a local database to quickly skip over files that were already backed up
- Log file reporter - single click to send logs to us if there is a problem with the software
- Improved suspend/resume behavior - better recovery from laptop suspend/resume cycles
The main features of 3.1.x overall are:
- Integrated backup client - quickly and easily select files and directories for scheduled backup
- Browse and recover files using your virtual drive
- Share directories as well as files
- Play music and videos (full-screen!) from your web brower
This update should provide you with significantly improved user experience along with better network performance.
How to install:
- Exit Allmydata if it is currently running.
- Uninstall any previous version of Allmydata.
- Download and run Allmydata 3.1.2.
- Enter a new or existing user/password and sign in.
- Select files and backup now!
We have many new features in the works as well, from improved backup scheduling to new platform support to updated web functions. Keep and eye on the Allmydata blog for the latest news!
Thanks and have fun!
The Allmydata Team
September 23rd, 2008
Hi all,
Thanks for bearing with us during our little outage. Everything should be up and going now, but you may need to log in and out of the web interface or at least refresh the screen. Note that no files were lost, it was just an access problem to the files for download. Below is a more technical description of the problem - please let us know if you experience any more issues!
First, let me set a little bit of context so that I can then describe the problem. Our system has a core of storage servers with a logical ring of web access servers. These web access servers provide the interface for our web drive, our native clients, and other third party clients (you can write your own if you want to - see http://allmydata.org!). The problem we encountered was that one of our public servers encountered an error which made it appear to still be available. This caused a small chain of errors which resulted in the rest of our access servers waiting on timeouts from the one server that was no longer available. We are creating a patch so that this type of error does not cause the same effects on the other servers again. If you would like any more details, please feel free to email us.
Hope this helps and sorry for the inconvenience,
Peter
September 22nd, 2008
Hi all,
We are still battling this problem a bit, but have narrowed it down to a problem with some of our customer facing web servers. A bit under half are responding properly, and the others are timing out for an unknown reason. Note that the actual storage servers are fine, this is just the access layer which is having problems.
If you really need to download a file from the web, try 3-5 times and one should work as our load balancer hits a server that works. Otherwise, please bear with us while we resolve this problem.
Thanks,
Peter
September 22nd, 2008
Hi all,
We are having some issues with access to our webdrive at the moment. At this point we can verify that the backend storage systems are responding normally, but the access to them through our web servers is encountering resistance. We are working on this now.
More updates to come …
Peter
September 22nd, 2008
Hi all,
We’ve just modified the authentication method slightly to be what it really should have always been. Specifically, the case no longer matters in your email that is used for login. Previously, SUPERDUPER@CRAZY.COM would map to a different account than superduper@crazy.com. They now map to the same account and you can enter in any case combination for the login, such as SuPeRdUpEr@CrAzY.cOm and it will map to the same account.
If you experience any issues with this, please let us know!
Peter
September 15th, 2008
Hi all,
We would like to add more visibility into the health and performance of our data storage service in order to give current and potential users confidence in our offering. We believe that we have a very reliable, available, and secure solution, but the only way to convince others of that is through hard facts and recommendations.
I’m soliciting feedback on what types of metrics would make you more comfortable with the health, reliability, and security of our service. We plan to add metrics such as:
- Availability - During the day, can you access the service? Are there any patterns of times where the availability is slow or unusable?
- Speed - How fast can a file be uploaded and downloaded from different points on the network?
- How much redundancy is available? Put another way, how much of our infrastructure can be destroyed before any of your data is affected?
- Total amount of data stored (from a user perspective and raw disk space consumed with redundancy)
- Total number of files stored
- Total amount of data and number of files added in last 24hrs
- Average usage per user
- Histogram of file sizes and types
Other suggestions are welcome and we look forward to showing you more about how well we are performing. Also, if you want more technical information about how our service works, feel free to browse the documentation and code at http://allmydata.org.
Thanks in advance,
Peter
September 11th, 2008
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