Streamload

» see streamload.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

my cloud-storage layer in 2007 was a stack of cd-r discs on the desk and an external usb drive sitting on top. i was a comp eng student in ankara on ttnet adsl. uploading a gigabyte over my home line to a us-coded consumer cloud-storage brand was not on the menu. streamload and its later masks sat firmly in the part of the us-side online-services catalog i only read about, until the data-loss writeup made the rounds in english tech blogs in 2008.

steve iverson started the company in 1998 out of adaptive data-compression algorithms he had built for a university thesis. the early streamload product was an upload-and-retrieve layer for large files at a time when email attachments still capped well under ten megabytes. for the late dial-up era, that was the actual unmet need. the company picked up coverage and awards through the early 2000s as one of the first cloud-storage brands to make consumer sense.

the rebrand to streamload mediamax came at demofall 05. the messaging shifted from a single send-files tool to a suite of ultra-high-capacity online services. by 2007 the company had raised meaningful follow-on funding and split into two pieces: nirvanix took the enterprise side with around $12 to $18 million in venture commitments, mediamax kept the consumer brand with around half a million. that was july 2007. one month earlier the company had already triggered the wound that took the consumer side down.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the script ~

june 15 2007 a streamload system administrator ran a cleanup script that was supposed to delete data for the roughly 3.5 million former user accounts the platform had accumulated since 1998. the script misidentified live data alongside the dead set. the cleanup ran through paying customers' files before anyone noticed. by the time the rollback began the damage had spread across the storage cluster. partial restoration work continued through october 2007. much of the wiped material never came back.

the consumer brand kept running. mediamax was renamed the linkup, marketed as a social network anchored on file sharing, and pushed through a v5 platform upgrade in 2008. the upgrade introduced more outages on top of the data already missing from the june 2007 incident. paying customers started cancelling in waves.

~ the day it died ~

july 10 2008 the linkup told its remaining roughly 20,000 paying subscribers that the service would close. customers had thirty days to retrieve whatever files were still recoverable. august 8 2008 the doors closed for good and the remaining storage went offline. the network world writeup the next day used the language permanent loss of data.

nirvanix on the enterprise side denied operational responsibility. its position was that savvis had been contracted to host the linkup's application and database under a separate arrangement. savvis pushed back. the dispute did not bring back any files. the apology page that ran on the linkup domain pointed customers at box.net.

~ what got buried with it ~

the storage industry has not forgotten the june 15 2007 script. it shows up in cloud-operations slide decks every time someone needs to make the case for hard quarantine periods on deletion scripts. nirvanix as the enterprise spin lasted until september 2013 when it told its own enterprise customers they had two weeks to move data off, a smaller version of the same exit. the streamload founder's compression work moved on with him. the brand itself is not coming back.

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