Monday, January 29, 2018

Xively: See I told you so...

Over and over again I've ranted about how I hate cloud storage of data, or reliance on cloud services for control around the house, and again I was justified. Earlier this month Xively (formerly Cosm (formally Pachube)) turned off free access. Never mind that years ago Pachube promised access forever for its early users and promised again when they became Cosm. Xively didn't honor the promise.

So much for promises. Remember the wonderful free service DynDNS that had its software installed on new routers? That went away a while ago and I had to change away from that service, now I get to stop the update process for Xively and pull the data from my local database instead.

At least I'm ready to do the switch, and I wish I had bothered to do it a year ago, but I was lazy. Teach me...

They were pretty nasty about it too. They sent emails to some fraction of their free users, and ignored the rest. Even the users that got the mail only got about two weeks notice and were unable to suck the data off the cloud service in time. The others (like me) found out from friends or just noticed one day that the service (and all their accumulated data) had disappeared from the site.

They couldn't even log in, and mails seemed to disappear into the same black hole as their data.

I don't recommend any product from LogMeIn. For software to avoid, see the Wiki page on the company and avoid all their offerings. The nasty way they did this should be a nice hint for folk.

I'm not going to recommend a replacement because this situation is only going to get worse over time. Hold your own data at someplace that belongs to you, not some profit driven jerks.

Now, where was that charting software I like.