One of a number of cheap online storage services — a group that includes Carbonite, Mozy and JungleDisk (which uses Amazon’s S3 storage system) — Omnidrive.com appears to be having significant problems, and according to some reports may be heading for the deadpool. Some users are reporting that they haven’t been able to access the service, and both the website and the official support forum site produce a 404 error. So does the blog of founder and CEO Nik Cubrilovic.
Read/Write Web wrote about the speculation in mid-December (I somehow missed it), and Cubrilovic responded that everything was fine — and not just fine, but great. The company was not only profitable but had gotten more funding, he said, and was coming out with a new release soon. Then the former chief technology officer for OmniDrive responded to the Read/Write post, however — and said exactly the opposite.
Not only did the former CTO say that the company had gone dark — “There is no one working at Omnidrive today. No one is supporting the customers. No one is developing version 1.0. The Wollongong and Sydney offices have been vacated” — but he said he hadn’t been paid for the work he did between April and August, and that he believed the money the company claimed to have probably never existed.
On the surface, this sounds a lot like the story of Sam Sethi and Blognation. I’ve sent Nik an email to see if he can tell me what’s going on. If anyone else knows anything, let me know in the comments. Regardless of what’s going on with Omnidrive, it’s wise to think about the possible downside of storing data in “the cloud,” as Webware notes.
Update:
A reader named Charlie says in the comments that he was able to login to Omnidrive, so the service itself seems to be operating, even if the website and support forums aren’t. And Simon East notes in a later comment that the website and forums are now back up — with a note from Nik saying there was a server outage and it took some time to get the site back up, but the service itself was never offline. No response to my email yet though.