Need feedback on off-site storage vendor, "Recall"

My last employer used Iron Mountain. We had lots of tapes stored with them. A good percentage of the tapes were being held for 10 years. Overall we were giving them a pretty hefty bit of money just for the basic pickup-storage-delivery function.

Our management allowed end users to treat our off site backups as near line storage. This meant that there were some groups of end users, mostly in house software developers, that would make stupid moves with files on the servers and request that a backup from a given date be restored as soon as possible. This meant that we were asking Iron Mountain for "emergency" deliveries of our backup tapes about twice a week.

There were two things that were, in my mind, completely unacceptable. First, a nonscheduled same day delivery cost us $500. Then they would deliver the tapes at their convenience. I could request an emergency tape delivery at 9:00 a.m. and it might not be delivered until 7:00 p.m. It seemed to me that $500 was a pretty steep delivery charge. It also seemed to me that if we were paying that much money they should have had a special courier with just that tape deliver it to us immediately. They were certainly making enough money on these nonscheduled deliveries to have given the tapes to one person, have them get into a car, and hand deliver the tapes. What they did was to put the emergency delivery tapes on one of their trucks that would make their regular deliveries first, then deliver the emergency delivery to us.

Plus, the Iron Mountain boxes could not be locked.

In their favor I would say that they were very good about returning boxes of tapes when the retension period had expired. They were also very good about collecting boxes of new tapes on time.

Lastly, Iron Mountain recently had an incident of losing a customer's tapes.

That's all that I know to be a fact about Iron Mountain.

Stay away from Iron Mountain, they have no idea what they're doing. They bought out the backup storage company we were with and since then it's been a mess. In the past we had a schedule and they would pickup the tapes and drop off another set once a week. After Iron Mountain took over nothing changed. Then all the sudden the driver came to pickup the tapes, but didn't drop off last weeks tapes. Our new account manager (one out of several account managers we now have with I.M.) told us we need to specify each week when we want the tapes the be returned. On top of that they gave us attitude, telling us they've always done it this way. It has been several months since the buy out and nothing had changed nor were we notified of their procedures. How hard is it to follow a fixed schedule? Why should we have to go into their system every week to specify the same thing over and over? Since the problems began the new driver came later, so I would drop off the tapes later. Yesterday he showed up early and dropped of the tapes. When our receptionist asked if he was supposed the pick up anything he was rude to her. He said he didn't care because there were no tapes there so he was going to leave. Nothing changes, it's the same routine every week, how diffcult can that be to follow. I admit I should have left the tapes early regardless and the receptionist should have called me, but the way Iron Mountain does business is a joke. We're looking for a new offsite data storage company as we speak.

I was a DR consultant and had interfaced on both Recall and Iron Mountain and used to have them send tapes to Sungard in NJ.

Obviously you are still on the tape technology age of backup / Restore on the now net auto-replication generation ;-)

Recall can do it,they're reliable. They have a white globe services too.

Hope this helped you ...simply call me Marlon Brando

Hello I used recall for 15 years getting ripped off by there high prices, the company is to big for you! How many boxes are you going to store? Will let me tell you about recall, I had 4025 boxes at recall, my bill monthly including retrieving boxes was 6000.00+ a month that's absurd! Here's the good part they won't let you leave they will hold your boxes hostage and make ridiculous request for invoices unpaid and so on, I have been fighting with them since may when I change to a different storage facility, my boxes started moving in January or they was suppose to but they didn't , my boxes should have been out by may when my contract ended, several months of sitting on there ass and no boxes moved, now they want me to pay for services not tended, I still have boxes there since may now they want me to pay because they could not get my boxes out on time! After several emails and no replies and several phone calls to voicemail not returned my company decided to pay the terrorist to release the hostage boxes, there tactics are unreal, there business friendliness is only there till they get your account.good luck if you go with them! I found another storage facilities that does the same thing recall does without the bullshit for more then half the price of recall.shop around before you hang yourself.