The following is an actual ticket with ThePlanet's Backup support team. This is truely the support the redundancy you'll receive using Disksync.

Details:
Customer - Friday July 11th, 2008; 8:08 AM CDT
Since our xxx server is currently down, we are trying to restore the databases to our web server so we can get the sites up in the meantime. Can you please restore (or walk me through restoring) the SQL Server databases from the DiskSync Vault for xxx(xx.xx.xx.x) to xxx(xxx.xx.xx.xxx)

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ThePlanet Support - Friday July 11th, 2008; 9:07 AM CDT
Dear Dean Dorazio,

I am going to forward this ticket over to our backups group. Please standby for updates.

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ThePlanet Support - Friday July 11th, 2008; 6:21 PM CDT
Hello Dean,

Please stand by until I look into the issue.

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Customer - Monday July 14th, 2008; 7:26 AM CDT
Do you have an update? I really didn't expect a data restore to take 3+ days. I need an answer ASAP.

ThePlanet Support - Monday July 14th, 2008; 9:42 AM CDT
When I logged into your machine, I saw that you have your agent "Web Server" registered to your database server. This mean the task myBackup is seeing the safesets backed up for our database server. Now you can just start a manual Restore and choose the Data files you need to and the location where you want to. We can do it for you if you specify the above mentioned details. If you have any further questions, please let us know.

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Customer - Monday July 14th, 2008; 9:52 AM CDT
Correct - Where's my data? The only data there is 3+ months old. This is scheduled nightly and we didn't receive a notification that it's not running.

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ThePlanet Support - Monday July 14th, 2008; 10:27 AM CDT
You backups were not occurring since 16th March. From what I can understand from the logs is, the jobs failed to run as the Disksync agent might have stopped running in your machine for some reason, which means everything else stops working, even the email notification. I hope this clarifies your question.

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Customer - Monday July 14th, 2008; 3:22 PM CDT
"for some reason"? ThePlanet has no monitoring on with a client's data is being backup correctly?

All that it clarifies is ThePlanet has a VERY pathetic backup process. So, I guess what you're telling me is all the backup data since March 16th is lost? Please confirm?

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ThePlanet Support - Monday July 14th, 2008; 3:35 PM CDT
I apologize for the inconvenience caused, but there was no backup activity initiated from the 16th of March because the Agent was not running in your machine. It was because the version you were using was very old (5.00), while the latest one is 5.62. We upgraded the agent to 5.62 on the 11th of July when we saw it was not running. When there were no backups initiated with the Agent not running, the question of success/failure does not come. Please note that it is the customer s responsibility to configure and schedule backups,but no backups are scheduled to occur by default. Once again, we deeply apologize for what has happened. If you have any further questions, please let us know.

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Customer - Monday July 14th, 2008; 3:36 PM CDT
"for some reason"? ThePlanet has no monitoring on with a client's data is being backup correctly?

All that it clarifies is ThePlanet has a VERY pathetic backup process. So, I guess what you're telling me is all the backup data since March 16th is lost? Please confirm?

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Customer - Monday July 14th, 2008; 3:42 PM CDT
You didn't upgrade DiskSync - we did and we did it today.

So, the backups stopped because the software you supplied to us and we pay for monthly was old? You're just finding this out now. What type of customer service is this?

PLEASE HAVE YOUR MANAGER CALL ME ASAP. This is unacceptable.
xxx-xxx-xxxx

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ThePlanet Management - Monday July 14th, 2008; 5:32 PM CDT
Dear Customer,
We apologize for this inconvenience. I attempted to call, but there was no answer. Disksync is a self managed service that unfortunately can have issues. We recommend changing your notification email address specified in the Disksync agent to a monitored email address.
Thank you

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Customer - Monday July 14th, 2008; 7:23 PM CDT
Please review and understand the problem before replying. DiskSync itself was the problem not the configuration of Disksync. It had a correct email address in place to a monitored email box. No warnings were given even issued. According to your engineer it was the age of Disksync that caused it to stop working. That's funny concerning it a monthly paid service. I little warning that the software you give us to use would stop working would have been nice. Now we've lost the lost 4 months of client data.
Please have a manager contact me 8:30 - 5:00 EST. I need to talk to someone by the end of business tomorrow as I've been waiting for a "real" response for close to a week now.
Dean Dorazio

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ThePlanet Support - Monday July 14th, 2008; 9:20 PM CDT
Hello,

We apologize for this inconvenience.The agent version was one of the reasons which might have stopped the agent running. More importantly was the storage pool was filled which had to be cleaned against the backup task id (this is what your disksync log says). For the pool not being cleaned caused backups to stop running! As Disksync being a self-managed service, it is entirely on the customer to install the agents/consoles, create backup tasks, schedule tasks, monitor the backups and schedules. For the customers to closely monitor the backup activity email notifications are provided, and we expect that they have been setup correctly by them. The support team for Backups can help the customer in setting them up if they have any trouble doing it but they have no way to monitor these backup activities until and unless the customer creates a ticket. In this case, we would have expected you to create a ticket telling us about the backup failure and we would have taken a look at it and rectified immediately. We recommend you to change your notification email address (which has not worked for you) to receive correct updates. Please let us know if you have further questions.

Thank you,
Professional Services Engineer - Storage
The Planet

So you never checked your backups every now and then to see if they were running?

Thats the first thing I always do no matter what. Check my backups every week or so, and make sure backups are getting done as I specified them in the config.

A good lesson to all of us (sorry that it came at your expense) to check your backups regularly and make sure they're going.

Also though a bit more labor intensive, at some interval it's good to check that your backups are actually complete and everything you need by doing a "restore" to another box (or maybe directory if discsync is limited to one specific server) to make sure the whole backup - restore cycle works as expected, before it's actually needed in an emergency.