Posting as a reminder to myself that "in the cloud" != safe
There's always room for computer error, and more like, human error.
Imagine if something like this happened to Dropbox? Ooooft.
There's always room for computer error, and more like, human error.
Imagine if something like this happened to Dropbox? Ooooft.
Complex restoring never works well when the first implementation is under the pressure of the real event. Other SaaS providers will be cursing such a big name tool making such a public mess.
DR is not a luxury. Systems that don't properly do DR aren't unoptimized or something, they're badly engineered.
Those all look like more trouble than they're worth before you start, but they aren't that hard. And you'll recover your whole investment the first time you need to restore something and it's just a simple tweak to your standard test practice.
If they had done this exercise even once a year, they would have known better what to expect, or how much it would take.
It's more than a cliché that without restore tests, you don't really have a backup-- if the customer won't commit to testing the DR, we won't provide the service anymore. Anyone who pretends anything else is acceptable is kidding themselves.
I think he was able to recover most or all of his data (I forget if it was photos or what) but it was interesting to realize that even with Dropbox's stellar record and pedigree, errors like that can still happen.
It makes you realize data is just so fragile. Our bits are unlikely to last centuries, which is kind of unfortunate. I've wanted to take on this problem in a systematic way somehow. It seems like bittorrent offers a way to make a digital time capsule -- theoretically, if you have seeders, your data will persist forever. So you could imagine setting up a "time capsule" of sorts. Example: $2,000 on Digital Ocean will get you 33 years of server time. So that's one seeder, "guaranteed" to last 33 years. I wonder how far the costs could be reduced? Could you reach the 1 century mark for less than $3k? Costs will continue to go down, so it should be possible to have 10 seeders for your time capsule.
And then of course you have to think of what to put into your time capsule. There's not any guarantee the computing architecture will be the same a century from now. But somehow I suspect Python 2.7 might still run. :) You could write some kind of rudimentary AI program that responds to basic questions, maybe using the data embedded in the time capsule...
The only part I can't figure out is the most obvious one: Digital Ocean probably won't be around 20 years from now, let alone a century from now. So even if you get a bunch of money together, how do you reliably transform that money into running servers over the course of a century?