Fly Safe with the Cloud to Your Summer Vacation Destination

July 29, 2010

It’s that time of year again — the summer! And with summer comes summer vacation, new destinations, and holiday travel. These days, we’re not just taking the regular old stuff on our trips — we’re now taking all sorts of electronic gadgets loaded with important data. Laptops, phones, cameras, MP3s, you name it — they’re all being stuffed away into our suitcases and pockets as we embark on our holiday travel.

However, as many travelers know, the dangers of loss and theft increase while on vacation or in a new place.

No matter how careful you are, sometimes it just happens. Suitcases get lost. Gadgets are swiped. Things get left behind or damaged. And even if you get a new one, the danger is that the soul of that item can never be retrieved — that is, the data. The pictures, music, videos and documents you put together over time — especially over your vacation time — can be gone forever.

A couple friends had gone to a foreign country recently, and put their bags in the trunk of a taxi cab. When they got out, they simply forgot to take out their bags — which contained two laptops. It wasn’t the laptops that concerned them as much as the priceless files on their laptops. Well, they spent an entire two stress-filled days of their vacation chasing down cabs and dealing with a not-so-organized taxi company, all in a language they couldn’t speak and fearing the worst.

Luckily, the cab driver was a nice guy and when he found the laptops he found a way to contact them and give it back. But how often does that happen in a foreign, unknown land where you can’t even speak the language? Instead of finding out the hard way, it is always wise to back up your data — especially when backing up is so incredibly simple, cheap, and convenient, and accessible worldwide.

So before you dump your bags in that foreign taxi’s trunk, make sure all that data was first backed up and dumped into our ElephantDrive Trunk. You’ll definitely get it back.


And…we’re back! And better than ever!

July 29, 2010

Members of the Herd,

Just updating you that our maintenance is complete and we are operating at full capacity again. Apologies to anyone who experienced performance degradation or errors in the last hour or so. Please let us know if your are noticing any changes (positive or negative)…

Thanks again for your patience!

Team EDrive


System upgrades today…

July 29, 2010

Hi ElephantDrive Nation,

Just to alert everyone, we are going to be executing a hardware upgrade today. We’ve already tweeted about it, but wanted to put a notice here as well. Please let us know if you see anything out of the ordinary, but be advised you may experience intermittent connectivity or slower speeds from 1:00 pm PDT to 2:00 pm PDT today (July 29, 2010).

We’ll post again when the upgrade is complete.

Thanks!


The New Sharing Feature on ElephantDrive: A Great New Way to Share

July 26, 2010

We recently launched an updated way of sharing at ElephantDrive. We’ve added features to make it even more simple, safe, and easy to share. So whether you’re an individual who wants to share parts of your life, or a business sharing sensitive documents, or somewhere in between – you can try out our new share feature on the website.

Now, you can

  • Protect your share with a password
  • Tweet your share
  • Share with someone who doesn’t have an ElephantDrive account
  • Use a super easy interface to guide you through the process!

So you can rest assured. Not only are we expertly securing your files on the cloud, but we’re taking care of your shared files too. We do the caring. You do the sharing.


A Business Online Backup Solution that’s VMWare Ready Certified

July 2, 2010

For those of you considering NAS as a solution for disaster recovery and business online backup for your small to medium business, did you know that NetGear’s ReadyNAS is VMWare Ready Certified?

As one SearchSMBStorage.com article pointed out, being VMWare Ready Certified gives your small business peace of mind and is a solution tailored to your needs:

“The business-class ReadyNAS products were designed specifically for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), especially those with tight budgets. The rack-mount ReadyNAS family comes with 1U 4-bay models as well as the 2U 12-bay models. All ReadyNAS business-class models also come with unified network-attached storage (NAS) and iSCSI storage architecture, data replication and offsite data archiving.” (Full article here)

The best part is, ElephantDrive supports secure offsite backup with the NAS to protect your valuable business data.


The Most Interesting Plan in the World…

July 1, 2010

You know about The Most Interesting Man in the World, right?

When he isn’t saving baby condors, charming princesses, or sipping on Dos Equis beer, he is dispensing sage advice.  Just a couple blocks from ElephantDrive headquarters, he can be seen advocating our very service…

Recommended by The Most Interesting Man in the World

That’s right – “if you didn’t use your backup plan, you played it too safe.”   He knows how important a backup plan is.  So, don’t take our word for it – take it from The Most Interesting Man the World.  Back it up, right now!  Preferably with ElephantDrive.


Big Data? More like Huge Data…

May 5, 2010

We deal with large amounts of data every day here, so it takes a lot to impress the team when it comes to numbers.  But the recent IDC/EMC report entitled Digital Universe Decade did just that — the massive growth of digital information that has fueled the hot topic of “Big Data” and the commercial demand for cloud storage solutions is just getting warmed.  The report projects that the next decade will see data expand by a factor of 44!  We are talking about Zettabytes.

In 2010 there will be 1.2 Zettabytes of data generated.   To put that in perspective (borrowing from the report and other coverage), that is…

  • The digital information created by every man, woman and child on Earth ‘Tweeting’ continuously for 100 years
  • 75 billion fully-loaded 16 GB Apple iPads, which would fill the entire area of Wembley Stadium to the brim 41 times, the Mont Blanc Tunnel 84 times, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider tunnel 151 times, Beijing National Stadium 15.5 times or the Taipei 101 Tower 23 times
  • A full-length episode of FOX TV’s hit series ’24′ running continuously for 125 million years
  • 707 trillion copies of the more than 2,000-page U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into Law in March 2010. Stacked end to end, the documents would stretch from Earth to Pluto and back 16 times or cover every inch of the United States in paper 3 feet deep

So, yeah.  Huge Data.

Please don’t forget to back yours up and keep it accessible from anywhere at ElephantDrive or Compliant Data.


How can your business benefit from cloud storage?

April 7, 2010

According to this post from Businessweek.com, cloud storage can benefit your business in a number of ways, including the ability to:

  • lower costs
  • free-up capital and resources
  • replace antiquated storage solutions
  • leverage unlimited storage scalability

ElephantDrive’s enterprise-class partner, CompliantData, offers a feature-rich, robust online storage and backup solution specifically designed to meet your business needs.  Contact us for more information.


ElephantDrive Systems Update

April 7, 2010

This is a system update and incident report for a partial system outage on April 7th, 2010 from approximately 2:00 am PDT to 8:30 am PDT.

During the last several hours, we experienced an unexpected period of degraded service.  The direct result was the inability to authenticate and login for a subset of our user base.  The indirect consequences of the problem were, for the affected users, the inability to add new files and access existing data during the window.

The security and integrity of all data stored in our systems was not impacted in any way.

The root cause of the problem has been identified and corrected, so all users should be experiencing normal operations and performance as of this posting.  The problem resulted from instability in the software virtualization layer of one node of the authentication system which has been successfully re-engaged.

We apologize for an inconvenience and will continue our efforts to automate detection and resolution of any similar issues so that we can minimize any future issues.


ElephantDrive Systems Alert

April 7, 2010

Important Update:  We are currently responding to reports of login and access problems.   The engineering team is aware of the issue and working on removing and replacing the problematic component.

We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion and will update with a System Update and Incident Report as soon as the process is complete.

Thanks again to all users who have alerted us to the issue.