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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

Well, the business was acquired for $500,000,000 and a single employee probably costs what backing up two petabytes of data for a year (on glacier) does.

They could also always use tapes, for something as critical as the data that is the blood of your business.

Imagine if facebook lost everyones' contact lists, how bad would that be for their business? Backups are cheap insurance.

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Backups are still a hard sell for management, though. No matter how many companies die a quick and painful death when they lose too much business critical data, the bossmen just can't wrap their heads around spending $100k for what they perceive as no benefit.

Same problems with buying things like antivirus software or even IT management utilities; when they're doing their job, there's no perceivable difference. It's only when shit goes sideways that the value is demonstrated.

Hell you could take this a step further for IT as a whole; if IT is doing their job well, they're invisible. Then they can the entire department, outsource to offsite support, and the business starts hemorrhaging employees and revenue because nobody can get anything done.

>No matter how many companies die a quick and painful death when they lose too much business critical data, the bossmen just can't wrap their heads around spending $100k for what they perceive as no benefit.

Yeah, but what exactly IS the benefit? The business doesn't die if something really bad happens? Is that really important though?

Consider the two alternatives:

1) The business spends $x00k/year on backups. IF something happens, they're saved, and business continues as normal. However, this money comes out of their bottom line, making them less profitable.

2) The business doesn't bother with backups, and has more profit. The management can get bigger bonuses. But IF something bad happens, the company goes under, but then what happens to the managers who made these decisions? They just go on to another job at another company, right?

I'm not sure I see the benefit of backups here.

The managers that make these decisions need to have equity.

Seems like they do just fine with big golden parachutes. Why tie their compensation to the company's performance when they can just have a big payout whenever they leave under any circumstances?

> Yeah, but what exactly IS the benefit? The business doesn't die if something really bad happens? Is that really important though?

I mean the way management gets on me when we have outages, you'd think that was a significant priority?

They can get more money in the short term by pushing you harder, and there's zero cost to them to go yell at you. If they could get a bigger bonus by ignoring outages, they'd do that, but instead, they can get a bigger bonus by pushing you to reduce outages without any additional resources.

You'd be absolutely right but it's still a sad state of affairs.

I worked at a place that lost their entire CVS repository. The only reason they were able to restore it at all was because I made daily backups of the code myself. Sure, a lot of context data was still still lost, but at least there was some history preserved.

They are expensive until the business goes bankrupt.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually the rationale for not having backups.

Tumblr is apparently fragile and tech-debt laden on engineering side, stagnant on users, and unprofitable. At a certain point, it's a coherent decision to just say "a few days of downtime would seal our fate, the business can only be saved if everything goes right", and not spend any money on mitigation.

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