Public File Changes, MUCH FASTER!

Making files public is much faster now!  Last week many of you had trouble making files public or were seeing huge delays in the process, sometimes taking several hours to actually complete.  We were fighting on and off all week with our queueing system, it seemed to encounter a perfect storm of issues from all directions.

So what has happened?

First a bit of background; from the beginning we have treated public files as separate from your "My Files" storage- the primary benefit of this is that you could make changes to, edit, rename or even delete a file from your private space without affecting your public links.  The disadvantage is that we have been maintaining 2 copies of the file, and even in the best of circumstances making a file public involves waiting for the system to copy your file.

On Friday we changed the way public files are tracked and stored so now we simply flag files as public rather than copying them.  On the plus side since we are storing the file only once your quota usage is reduced and the process of making files public is now instant.  It does mean that you will have to be careful about deleting files from your private space from now on, if you zap a file that is public you will break your links!

Thanks for bearing with us last week, and enjoy our new more responsive system!

Back in Action!

We are back! Again I'd like to extend an apology from our entire team to our users who couldn't access their files during our outage. We take very seriously the trust you have given us by hosting files in our system, and go to great lengths to honor that. From what Level 3 has told us this sounds like the perfect storm of network problems; but after today's extended outage we are already working on plans to make additional redundant bandwidth available in our main data center.

Network Outage...

As you have probably noticed myDataBus is currently offline; unfortunately our main network provider is experiencing a major outage affecting our entire state caused apparently by a fiber cut. At this time we do not have a repair time from them, but we hope to be back soon.

We're very sorry for the inconvenience; I'm sure that our users are as frustrated as we are at being unable to access your files!

If we do have any more information this evening I will be posting here until we are back.

Rendering problems in IE 6

Mea Culpa time-- if you tried to log into the site using Internet Explorer 6 over the weekend you were confronted by a blank screen with our black bar across the top. Our developers found and fixed the problem this morning; we understand for those of you that were affected that this was a frustrating problem, we apologize for the inconvenience!!

If our site is slow for you today...

We have been having issues with our bandwidth since last evening, causing some users to see much slower than normal downloads, and others to see their uploads time out. Please bear with us, we hope to have the issue resolved by the end of the day!

Building for Scale

myDataBus has been growing like crazy lately, thank you to all of you!! We are excited about continuing to expand our service and have a long list of features in store for you, but right now we are concentrating on improving the stability and scalability of our service as it grows.

Recent improvements include:
* Huge increase in bandwidth: The site was starting to really slow down during peak times, but in the last week you should have noticed a vast improvement in upload and download speeds. We are positioned now with plenty of room for growth and a quick upgrade route for adding more as we need it.
* Fixes for lost session problems: Some of our users have been having trouble logging into or staying logged into myDataBus.com; we have made some changes that have eliminated almost all of those cases, the only known outstanding issue is with Proxy servers at certain ISPs. We are working on several potential fixes, let us know if you are still seeing the 'logout problem!'
* Aliases for Public file and Photo Album links: In an effort to make public files and photo albums easier to use we have made the links much shorter, and have added an 'alias' feature to your account. We hope the new shorter links are more likely to survive email in particular!

I hope all of you have had a chance to try out our new photo album feature! We'll be adding more options for displaying your photos in different ways, if you have a favorite gallery style let us know.

Thanks again to all of our users for using myDataBus.com, and remember to tell your friends how to get their own 5 GigaBytes of FREE file storage!!

The case of the missing public files- Solved!

Over the past few weeks we have had scattered reports from some users about public files 'disappearing' from myDataBus accounts. We were finally able to isolate, reproduce and fix the problem yesterday. If you are one of the users that has 'lost' public files thanks for your patience, and share away!