adnX Software: “Blame the French!”
| Date | January 15, 2012 |
I’m pretty obsessive about backups. In addition to using Time Machine I clone my startup drive each night and I have monthly backup drive that I keep at work in case my house blows up.
I was considering online backup services but since my hosting provider, Dreamhost, gives me something like 18 zillion gigabytes of storage I thought I’d first try an application and avoid the monthly fees. My only requirements were that it be easy to include/exclude files and that the backups themselves be encrypted, just in case my hosted account got hacked.
There are a number of different applications that do remote backups but the only one that seemed to fit the bill was called Twin, from adnX Software. I played around with the limited trial version and it seemed to work well, so I bought the full $50 version (v1.3.2). Unfortunately I started running into problems, primarily that the reported backup size wasn’t changing when I created exclusions, so I couldn’t gauge how much data was actually being backed up. I was quickly losing confidence in the software.
I first tried the adnX support site. They made it easy to create a ticket and after filing two sat back and waited for their helpful response. A day went by. Another few days went by. There was no activity on my support tickets as far as I could tell. Two weeks later I went to Twitter to ask why my support request had gone unanswered. That’s when the fun began.
Of course, the French! I should have known. So I asked: “… is your Twitter reply the extent of the support customers should expect for the next 3 weeks?” To which they responded:
What a relief. I knew I needed something, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. When I asked them: “Might it have been wise to alert your customers to the downtime? Or would you rather they have track you down on Twitter?” they replied:
and then this gem:
I realize how hard customer support can be, especially for a little company. You have to make the best of a small team and you can’t keep all your customers happy all of the time. I get it. But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a company trying to illicit sympathy for themselves by referencing the apparent long history of laziness among the Frenchmen they employ.
For all I know the new version of Twin (the one I was supposed to be patient for) is the greatest backup software on the planet, but I have no plans to find out. I asked for and got my money back. I suppose the lesson here is that if you suspect a company’s engineers are wearing berets and it’s in the vicinity of summertime you might want consider other software.
