And honestly, if you don't keep data of stuff you host on a server provider like this, you kind of get what you deserve...
Pretending that the cloud is permanent in infallible is extremely dangerous. I would seriously question the competence of any sysadmin relying on this as a base principle.
Sure, they screwed up, but this stuff happens. We should actually be happy it happens "only" on a "small-ish" provider like Gandi and not an entire AZ at Amazon.
Can't wait for that shoe to drop, I'll bring the popcorn, if there's anything left of civilization then...
As far as I understand correctly they only made snapshots on the same machine, which is why there's trouble to begin with.
Considering they're currently "reminding" customers that backups are an industry standard right after losing data due to missing backups I wouldn't just shrug it off.
The fun, of course, starts that one time when it does not work and you realize that no one looked at the corner case that bit you.
Backups aren't free. Replication isn't free. DR isn't free. If a customer isn't paying a premium for them, they aren't getting them. Read the terms of service.
See full thread. Snapshots are marketed as backups.
Intelligent people can argue all day about whether a snapshot should be considered a backup or not, but it won't change the fact that a snapshot doesn't provide any protection from a failure in the underlying storage and it's ridiculously foolish for the owner of data to solely rely on snapshots as their backup strategy.
That depends on how snapshot storage is implemented by the hosting provider. They can use different storage for it, or tapes or whatever. On AWS I can easily have my snapshots on Glacier or copy them to a different data center.
Having cloud provider X say they moved the bits from one place to another should not be considered a backup by anyone, regardless of what they advertise.
- Was this mostly a power loss or a data loss?
- If data loss, did this affect EBS (which has had a claimed annual failure rate of 0.2% - 0.5% or so if I remember) or S3 (much lower failure rate). Remember, EBS WILL have volumes go bad - that's in the docs, they recommend snapshots, aws backup manager etc if you need higher durability.
While I agree that everyone should have their own off-site backups, this does come across as incredibly crass victim blaming.
Sure, let's blame the victims here; that's effective and helpful.
Give me a break... It's not like anyone died here. There's a reason I host my own shit. Problems happen, errors are made, and data is lost. It's also your responsibility to deal with data permanence, even if your provider has all the promises in the world.
A company violates their agreement with you in a way that costs you time, money, and potentially business, and you're not the victim?
They are fools on their side for failing to preserve user data, but you end up being the bigger fool for trusting them to do this for you without preserving a backup plan yourself.
for purposes of keeping your data safe, your cloud provider is just one, single, copy of your data. all of their redundancies and backups and whatnot are for _their_ convenience, not yours, regardless of the marketing copy.
(they can decide to intentionally delete your data because they think you didn't pay. no amount of RAID and georedundant backups on their part will help you then.)