Last week, Seagate emailed users to inform them that its Seagate Dashboard cloud storage service would be going through some updates that would render the upload capability of the service unavailable for "a few days" (over a fortnight). While the updates are processing and testing, scheduled backups have been suspended (or may result in errors) from through to October 18. However, Seagate's email to customers didn't really go into why it suddenly needed to shut down upload capability for more than two weeks. We got in touch with Seagate for some more details.
First of all, Seagate assures us that customers' data is perfectly safe. Though the company did urge people to make a back up of their data, the company describes this measure as merely a precaution.
"There is no risk to our customers' data, in fact, they will still have the ability to download their data during the maintenance period," Seagate told us in an emailed statement. "Seagate recommended that users create a copy of the content stored in the cloud merely as a precautionary measure. Seagate always advocates that users should keep multiple backup copies of data in separate locations."
So what happened? We were right in assuming this was not a planned update, and that Seagate ran into an issue that necessitated an interruption to service. Specifically, Seagate found out on September 18 that the back-end storage service provider for its software vendor, Nero, was shutting down. Nero needed to find a new back-end service provider and migrate the data. The ongoing suspension of user data upload is a result of that migration to the new provider. Seagate says customers were informed on October 2, immediately after Seagate and Nero were able to finalize a seamless migration solution.
"This was not a planned maintenance. The notification of the need to migrate was on extremely short notice. Seagate acted quickly to protect our customers’ data by extending the deadline with our vendor, Nero, and by identifying the smoothest possible migration path." Seagate said in its email to Tom's Hardware.
Seagate Cloud Storage Service customers can expect normal operation to resume on October 18.
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