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Comment by d0lph | Hacker News Reader

Always keep an offsite backup.

If keeping an offsite backup only let you back up 0.001% of your data, and cost you 1x of your annual revenue, your employer wouldn't keep one either.

Our data is in our DNA. A population of a few thousand would pretty much guarantee a 100% backup.

So, it's not a backup. It's a document containing basic instructions for how to eventually build a database that's similar to your PROD copy.

I wouldn't pay through the nose for that, either. Especially when we could be putting that time and energy into not losing the PROD deployment, today, with a much better ROI.

We don't need to worry about hypothetical 50-million year meteor strike extinction events. We're in the middle of one, that we could be taking action to deal with - for much less the cost of a self-sufficient Mars base.

You're worried about off-site backups, when the trash can in the data center is on fire, and you cant budget for a fire extinguisher.

>>I wouldn't pay through the nose for that, either. Especially when we could be putting that time and energy into not losing the PROD deployment, today, with a much better ROI.

There are certain types of disasters you can't protect against though, no matter how much money you spend. The only thing you can do is mitigate.

A backup of humanity.

I would say it's more like keeping a zip file of your data. It may not be as usable, but if you lose your primary you can reinflate it and it will do just fine.

The water bears can re-inflate and the future of life on earth will be some other evolutionary tract. No worries mate. Why is humanity so important anyway?

Some theories posit that Earth may contain the only life nearby (or possibly in the universe) [0]. Since we are the only space faring species on our planet, the water bears would need our help to preserve their genetic record. Life on Earth has less than 2 billion years left, but the universe in general has a lot more than that left.

https://www.space.com/41080-alien-life-may-be-rare-today.htm...

It's the towels.

If we die, does it matter to us than the human species survives somewhere? Like if it’s not going to protect me, why should it matter that much to me that I should support the effort?

Not if you the data loss is caused by an error or virus in the software, and you use that same software to access your "backup".

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