Shame on us (we screwed up!)
We just found out that we made a mistake that resulted in one of our users losing his GMail contacts. Although we try everything to create backups of all the contacts in Soocial. This should never happen, EVER.
First of all our public apologies to our two beta users @oliverg and @kojote that lost their data due to our screw up.
In this blog post we want to explain what happened, how we have solved it (for now), and what we are doing to ensure safe backups in the future.
Let us explain what happened
The very first sync with GMail goes something like this:
- We get all contacts stored in GMail
- We make a backup of these contacts and email this to the user
- We delete all contacts in GMail
- We sync Soocial’s contacts to GMail
The problem here is that once we have the contacts from GMail and send the backup, we assumed that successfully sending the email means it is safe to remove the GMail contacts, then sync and replace with the contacts in Soocial. The assumption that sent mail will be delivered was a bad assumption. We’re hoping that the sent email is still underway on the internet somewhere but after three days we doubt it. This situation makes it (painfully) clear that we need these backups saved locally too.
The way we are going to do it:
- We get all contacts stored in GMail
- We make a backup of these contacts, email this to the user
AND store it in your new Backup area - We delete all contacts in GMail
- We sync Soocial’s contacts to GMail
We have created a backup system that takes a snapshot of your contacts and saves them in your account. Any time you add any connection (Phone, Mac, Highrise, Facebook or Gmail), a backup is created and stored in your backups, where you can download a .vcf file of these contacts. In the future we’ll be adding support to view the backups in a list and do a per contact restore or a mass restore. For now please create a backup of your own before you use our GMail connection, in case this happens to you as well.
We’re terribly sad and frustrated that we lost data of two of our users like this.
Hi. well my contacts were just mainly mail-contacts and I have all those also in my mailbase. I hadly ever delete mail, as I am on Gamil, right? ) It's just a pity fpr 2 Dozen of mail distributions listsm which I can reconstruct with some labor. (Does anyone know the most elegant way to make a contact-group in gmail from a copy/paste from a bcc:-line?
As i said before and will repeat on wish, it was totally cool how you solved the problem and this clear words from you about the situation are what i like about web 2.0 :) keep on the good work, you have a great service here, don't let one bug take you down.
This is what I totally dig about you guys. Transparency, sharing information, owning your mistakes. Totally Soocial. Keep it up, it makes a difference!
My contacts have gone odd too... my Gtalk list is now empty...
Looks like my Contacts have gone too.. they are still THERE in Gmail.. when i click on "contacts" but not there whenever another website /service looks for them... (Gtalk, Facebook, Twitter etc).. they seem to have gone!!
OK, things have got worse - - -Gmail contacts have all gone.. only the group names are left... and .. importing the email's "backups" fails.. "s Sorry, we could not recognize the file form". please advise!
William, I'll try to contact you directly and see what we can do.
Just to follow up - Stefan has helped me though my own mess with fantastic, immediate and helpful support. If there was a delete button on my careless posts above, I'd use it! My contacts are working great, and look forward to the connections to other devices and services in the future! very satisfied user
hey William,
thanks! love the color thing you did there :p
I am really impressed on how you share your mistakes with everyone. This proves to me that the developers, management, and the company are trustworthy. This is important when you are handling people's sensitive data. Please keep this up because this is a reputation that is lacking in businesses today.
I've had troubles with almost any sync tool. It is always a good thing to backup your contacts before you do anything harmful. So: Soocial users: use the Gmail export facility to create an offline backup for security purposes, especially since you're using a beta...
@everyone, please hear what Breggol says!
@breggol, thanks for that. We have large warnings for our users that warn them to create backups before they do key things. Thanks for the stringent reminder ;-)