omNovia suffered a malfunction on the cloud servers that store their customers’ archived recordings of webinars and web meetings. Some customers lost their recordings completely and others found problems such as missing audio on playback.
The problem does not impact all customers or all recordings, but the company is unable to proactively identify which files may have been affected. omNovia customers should check their recording files to ensure proper operation.
omNovia’s official statement about the problem can be found by clicking on this sentence.
This points out the inherent danger in relying completely upon any single storage location for critical data, whether on your local PC, on your company’s servers, or on a vendor’s servers. The problem with recording methodologies that are locked in to the vendor’s format and can only be played from their servers is that the customer lacks the ability to copy the file to a backup location.
A few other web conferencing vendors take a similar approach to omNovia, forcing all recordings to live on the vendor’s server locations, with no ability for customers to download the files. If you have critical recordings that have to stay in existence for legal reasons or business continuity, it may be worth the extra time and effort to use a screen capture tool such as Camtasia to record the playback of your session so that you have an emergency failsafe backup.
