Is Omnidrive down for good?

We got an e-mail earlier today from a Webware reader and Omnidrive user who told us the online storage service has been out since early this morning. We sleuthed around a little and tried to get in touch with Omnidrive CEO Nik Cubrilovic, whose personal blog is also down, although we've heard nothing back yet. As of publishing this, the service is still down.

Last month Read/WriteWeb broke a story about the online storage service heading to the mythical Internet deadpool after picking up on a flurry of unresolved technical difficulties that had been listed in the official and unofficial Omnidrive support forums. Cubrilovic responded to the RWW post saying that all was peachy, with a new release on the way and a healthy dose of funding in the can. However, hours later Ex-CTO Phil Morle responded with a completely different story, saying that there were no more staff on board and that he had never been paid for his services over his four-month stint with the company. Worse yet, Morle said that member dues weren't properly going to paying the monthly server bill, leading to unexpected downtimes.

If the downtime is permanent, the real losers in this situation are the paying users with critical data that cannot be accessed. Deadpool or not, the best you can hope for in a situation like this is an escape hatch to get your data out and migrate it elsewhere. We'll keep you posted.

Update: (1/9) A handful of users have let us know that the Windows desktop client is still working for them, despite the Omnidrive site and connected support forums being down.

[manhog]

just accessed all my omnidrive data a moment ago. the URL may be down, but the windows integrated software is still working as of this writing. i got in with no problems via windows explorer...

[trickmcsneak]

Looks like the writing's been on the wall for sometime. I've been somewhere similar to where Nik must be right now and, whilst it feels like you can't and mustn't make the call to shut down, there's a point where sticking your head in the sand and hoping that the problems will go away makes stuff worse, often much worse.

If you're reading this Nik, calling it quits isn't as bad as you think it'll be. More importantly, it's NOWHERE NEAR as bad as the repercussions will be if you keep digging the hole you're currently in.

I learnt the hard way.

[elphenix]

Nik's email adress is cubrilovic[at]gmail[dot]com. I have this address as he emailed me from there some months ago, so it's currently the only working way to contact Nik as all @omnidrive.com and @nik.com.au addresses are down.

Good luck (I left Omnidrive 2 months ago, so I don't mind if their site is down ...).

[Mick_Liubinskas]

Man, a storage system that is unreliable is dangerous. I'd take all of your stuff kept there and back it up somewhere else. I mean I'm with Flickr but I'm still going to back up my stuff.

Don't want to lose those pics.

[jfinlayson]

Omnidrive caches on your local drive a copy of all your online folders and files. Look in:

C:\Program Files\Omnidrive\[username]

So you should always automatically have a backup there.

[jpack2000]

This direct link to log in to your account seems to still be working for the web interface:
http://web.omnidrive.com/

Hopefully that will help anyone who needs to get at their data.

[Shayendel]

It might be of interest to readers that Nik's previous virtual drive venture MyVirtualDrive (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://myvirtualdrive.com/) went the same way that this iteration appears to be headed. That is to say that the developers quit due to lack of payment and the company was put into administration.

[DaleJohnson70]

I agree with Mick. Backing up my stuff exclusively online has always freaked me out. If the company disappears, you're hanging in the wind. I started using TrueSafe cuz I can do an "online" backup, but to my storage, i.e. over the internet to my other computer at home, as well as old fashioned offline backup to my usb drive.