Incredible damage for some users can be negligible damage to the company. In this case just 10TB of data was lost, so maybe thousands of users for the long term storage option.
Losing customer data has potential for big reputation or brand damage, but surprisingly often the damage is relatively small. Putting in too much effort when potential damage to business is minimal may not be worth of the cost.
Which is more of an indictment on the state of things than on the comment itself.
If you can't protect people's shit, don't offer to hold onto it for money!
I agree.
That's like saying:
- Slavery is bad.
- Then don't wear cotton clothes.
Maybe instead change the system so there's no slavery, and have non-slaves pick up cotton and make cotton clothes?
Non-capitalist countries can have computers and internet too. In fact most computers today are made in "communist" China.
No Most computers today are made in "Special Economic Zone" China that has exempted almost all communist economic policies in favor of Free market capitalism because even hard core authoritarian communists know that their economic model is a path to poverty for everyone including the leaders
EDIT: there was initially a typo in this comment. I meant "aren't free markets", not "are free markets".
If you do clearly you place no value on what most people call Basic Human Rights.
>> And I think it demonstrates that market based systems that are "free markets" can be quite effective,
I am not sure what you are trying to say here, everyone knows Free markets result in the best economic outcomes, that was my point. The argument I was countering was the Free markets are bad and socialism is good which history has proven wrong time and time again the only counter that socialist have is "those were not real socialism"
Any society more than a couple hundred people in size will fail miserably under a socialist economic model. Only Free markets provide for the best outcomes for the most people.
That is not to say there is no issue with capitalism in general, Crony Capitalism which is what you have with Heavily regulated markets like we see in the US is a real problem and is largely the cause of Wealth Disparity in capitalist systems,
I am further confused by your statement the Free Markets are better than "remove regulation at all costs" approach
Truly free markets have no regulation, so I am not sure what point you are driving at.
I don't like the human rights abuses in China. But that doesn't mean they don't do anything well. Such an argument is silly. I could makes a similar claim about the US. How does the US do on the right to healthcare for example? Awfully. But that is only tangentially related to the merit of their overall economic policy.
> everyone knows Free markets result in the best economic outcomes
No they don't. There is a lot of evidence that free markets lead to better economic outcomes then soviet-style planned economies. That they lead to the best possible outcomes of all possible economic systems is a highly suspect claim given that the economic outcomes they lead to aren't all that great (e.g. high levels of inequality).
You seem to have in your mind that free markets and planned economies (which you call socialism, although there are actually many forms of socialism that don't use a state-planned approach such as market socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism) are the only possible economic models. But in fact there are many other approaches. For example the scandinavian model is a mixed economy with some free-market aspects but also a large state (32% of the economy is public sector in Denmark vs 17% for the US and 50% for China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...), and much stronger regulation than in the US.
> That is not to say there is no issue with capitalism in general, Crony Capitalism which is what you have with Heavily regulated markets like we see in the US is a real problem and is largely the cause of Wealth Disparity in capitalist systems
Regulation is indeed a problem in the US. But that is only because of the regulatory capture leading to ridiculous regulations that enforce monopolies. In other places (I live in the UK) regulation actually prevents monopolies (e.g. we have laws that anybody may start an ISP using the shared fibre/copper infrastructure) and leads to much better outcomes than unregulated markets. I find it hilarious that you think the US markets are heavily regulated when they are some of the least regulated amongst OECD countries
> I am further confused by your statement the Free Markets are better than "remove regulation at all costs" approach. Truly free markets have no regulation, so I am not sure what point you are driving at.
Having no regulation is what I am describing as "remove regulation at all costs". My point is that there is a lot of evidence that such markets don't in fact function better than a more measured approach of "regulate where it's appropriate". The political position that all markets ought to be as free as possible is almost as extreme as the one that economies ought to state run.
Well first and foremost Healthcare is not a right. It is a Service that has to be provided based on limited resources
Rights are things like Free Speech, the Right to Self Defense, the right to not have your property stolen, etc
Aka Negative Rights
The right to be free from abuse
Things like "health care" are not Human Rights at all
How is "the right to not have your property stolen" any different from "the right to not have preventable diseases from killing or harming you"? In both cases there is some external problem that is prevented through the use of resources: in one case it's the police and legal apparatus. In the other case it's healthcare providers.
Incorrect, in the US I have no right to policing either, I have the right to defend my property myself from people that wish to take it. Our Courts have held continuously that no individual has the right to protection from the police force.
We do not have Positive Rights in the US, never have and hopefully never will because in order to have positive rights one must infringe on negative rights to supply them
So while I have the right to property, I must provide defense of that property myself. I can also ask the courts to mediate if there is dispute over said property.
Similar with healthcare, and one area I believe government regulations today intrude on my rights. I should have the right to ACCESS to care, but I would not have the right to require someone provide me with care. So for example I should have the right to purchase any medical supply, drug, etc from any person that wants to sell those supplies free from government interference, but the government should not provide me with that care, and should not steal errr tax other people's labor to provide me with that care either
That is not a negative right, it is not a right at all.
The entire concept of rights, as understood by common law, is based on Natural Rights under a Lockean philosophy of Self Ownership, that you own yourself.
Under no conceptional understanding of natural rights would have have the right to take someone else's property.
So if we are going to start from a completely foreign concept of negative rights then we have no basis for a conversation at all
https://www.learnliberty.org/videos/positive-rights-vs-negat...
The positive/negative distinction
There is no way for a government to provide you with healthcare (positive rights) with out infringment of my negative rights to my labor (i.e they must take a part of my labor via theft what you call taxation in order to provide you with the right to a service). The only other way for a government to provide a service would be indentured servitude where they require a person to provide the service under threat of violence / imprisonment
That is why I reject the concept of positive rights, because they require that other people have their labor, property, or self ceased by the government to fulfill those rights that is fundamentally unethical to me
negative rights do not have this ethical problem
This is particularly obvious in the case of private ownership of land. Without private property rights I would be free to walk across and otherwise make use of that land it is your property rights which take that freedom away from me. And this isn't a theoretical issue either: prior to the enclosure of land in the 15th-19th centuries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure), most land here in the UK was common land that anybody had a right to make use of to graze animals and make a living. The expansion of private property directly took away that right and deprived many of their livelihoods. Even today we still have the Right To Roam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#United_Kingdom) and at least walk on private land which provides for significantly more freedom than is available in the US (there is close to zero danger of being shot just for walking somewhere in the UK).
For other property it's less obvious, but enforcing your property rights still requires encroaching on my liberty. For example, without property rights, I would be free to walk into a shop and take whatever I wanted to. Or rock up to your unlocked car and drive off with it. The only way that this is prevented is through active enforcement by the state. Ultimately, if I persist in doing these things then I will be physically imprisoned. And it takes significant resources to run the policing and justice systems, just like healthcare. Now obviously nobody thinks I should just be able to walk up and take your care. But other forms of private property are controversial. In particular the idea that you ought to be able to keep all of that wealth that people give you (without taxation). You are only able to hold onto that wealth in the first place because the state enforces your right to keep it. There is nothing a priori that says that the state (which ultimately represents its citizens) must always enforce that right.
To summarise, many "negative rights", including the right to private property, have exactly the same ethical problems as "positive rights". At which point it becomes a simple matter of what you consider moral and important. You're right that state-provided healthcare deprives you of wealth that you could otherwise have. But the reverse is also true. You having the wealth deprives others of healthcare that they could otherwise have. You just happen to think that property rights are more "natural" and important.
For starters, who said human their rights violations go wholesale with their economic policy (and you can't have one without the other)?
Second, well, the US is not some paragon of freedom either compared to many western countries.
From the largest prison population per capita (25% of the worlds inmates for 4% of the worlds population), to slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, seggregation until 1970s, Japanese interment camps, the only country dropping atomic bombs (and to civilians nonetheless), McCarthyism, mass surveillance, and so on, all the way to Bush, Trump, and co (including the multi-war supporter Obama), plus constant meddling on foreign countries, invasions and occupations, etc., all the way to waterboarding, and such, yeah, I'd take "socialist" Denmark over it...
Some of that is because many nations massively under report their prison population (aka China).
I agree that the US has over criminalized Society, namely in the failed attempt to curb drug abuse by criminal enforcement
>>to slavery
yes yes, the US is the only nation to ever have slavery in all of history... ::rolleyes::
>> Jim Crow, redlining, seggregation until 1970s, Japanese interment camps, the only country dropping atomic bombs (and to civilians nonetheless), McCarthyism, mass surveillance, and so on, all the way to Bush, Trump, and co (including the multi-war supporter Obama), plus constant meddling on foreign countries, invasions and occupations, etc., all the way to waterboarding, and such, yeah, I'd take "socialist" Denmark over it...
I guess that depends on where you place your personal freedoms, All of those things are terrible, most of them are historic atrocities that many nations unfortunately have in their past, or the more modern ones impacted a small number of citizens, and they all universally hated by the population.
However with socialism even Denmark style socialism my Income would be massively stolen errr "taxed", I would not have many of my core freedoms (aka Self Defense / gun rights), I would not have the same free speech protections as the US, etc.
These all do impact me directly...
At best it's a mix, but hardly "free market capitalism".
Because it's fake, you don't hate capitalism if you like Hacker News, even if you think you can. Hacker News is literally owned and operated by venture capital firm
Say you happen to be born into a communist regime but dislike communism. Getting out of it might not be feasible for any reason ranging from not being allowed to, not having the means, to not wanting to leave your community behind. No matter if you now want to completely tear down the predominant social-economical systems or just tweak them, either way you going to have to interact with them.
If you want to destroy capitalism, hacker news is probably not the most promising place to start. If your goal is to tweak it I actually think it is.
The original comment said “hate” not “is bad”; probably the source of a lot of the confusion in this thread lol.
> If you want to destroy capitalism, hacker news is probably not the most promising place to start. If your goal is to tweak it I actually think it is.
Idunno, even just calling it “bad” seems to imply that there are better things, which is not really a statement about “tweaking” anything. A statement in favour of tweaking capitalism would be something like “capitalism on its own can not reliably produce moral goods”.
I read that as a somewhat hyperbolic expression of dislike, like "I hate spinach" – strong dislike, but not actual hatred. I might actually say that I hate spinach, because I really can't stand the taste, but I don't feel hatred towards it. But yes, I guess that may have caused some misunderstanding.
> just calling it “bad” seems to imply that there are better things, which is not really a statement about “tweaking” anything.
Like an improved version of that thing. Case in point: My last batch of salsa verde was bad, too few tomatillos, too much seasoning, so I'll tweak the recipe with a note to make sure the rations there don't skew that way next time. I don't have to give up on my recipe for good, or on salsa verde for good, or on food for good.
> A statement in favour of tweaking capitalism would be something like “capitalism on its own can not reliably produce moral goods”.
There are different variantions of capitalism implemented around the world right now; there are parameters that can be tweaked, like with the German "soziale Marktwirtschaft", which was a version of a capitalist market-based economy with socialist elements. Even in the US, the flavor of capitalism in Roosevelt's day was quite a bit different from the one currently in place, I believe.
I think there's a world where corporations aren't given a carte blanche pass on human decency.
I believe that world is nicer and where possible I work to give it room to exist;
I boycott Disney because I believe what they did to the copyright system is wrong.
I don't use Google or Microsoft products because I don't think they treat users with respect. (Minus youtube which I use a mirror, and the occasional google search when I get tired of banging my head against ddg (~1-2/week, but my tolerance is probably higher than most))
I'm even abstaining from my copy of Overwatch despite loving the gameplay of a character in it, because I don't believe supporting the HK protests warrants a ban.
I'm not going to boycott Canon from this, incompetence is generally forgivable, but I certainly think it's noteworthy, and if it comes to light they are as nonchalant as OP says they can be then I won't be supporting them.
Downthread someone had mentioned there was a 10GB/user cap, so it's unlikely someone had been using it as their only copy which is also reassuring.
But then again maybe someone was just getting into photography after having a baby, and their precious first photos were lost! Or photos from a special date, or first (god forbid last) moments with a pet; it's sad to think about, and it can't be justified with "darn, guess it's gone forever so Canon could gain a small advantage using some risk calculus. Oh well, I give more of a damn about the stock market than those photos."
Don't give me that shit!
Disclaimer: I only own a pitiful EOS 20d and a cute f1.4 50mm, but my friend has been super into photography and I've been wanting to get into it again.
Thanks for reading my rant.
?
I suppose it partially aligns with the intent of a boycott
Edit: I don't believe that kind of stuff should be collected without explicit, informed user consent. Make it clear what you're collecting and doing with it and chances are I'll opt-in.
https://instances.invidio.us/ Deleted sibling comment: https://i.imgur.com/YhXIU6O.png
I don't understand why a small total size implies people are less likely to use it for their only copy of something?
I'll wager a guess that in that world a corporation is not a 'legal person'. In that world, a "person" must have human characteristics. They call it the Legal Turing Test.
(positive statement is statement of what without indication of approval or disapproval, normative statement expresses a value judgment)
Seems like a value judgement to me.
Anyhow, something about `innumerable, singular sites of suffering' makes the point rather moot.
I wast trying to understand how business thinking work. Not judge or praise it.
> Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
[1] Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost–benefit_analys...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...
Turns out the Pinto was within the realm of normal for a car of that type and era and if you're building something normal it's hard to justify recalling it at great expense unless everyone else is recalling it to (in which case that would be normal).
What - I believe - made the Pinto case memorable was not that in a given subset of accidents it was (or was not) slightly more dangerous, it is the fact that the matter was looked into by the manufacturers and that it was waved off on a mere cost/benefit basis (with a supposed cost for increased security per car of US$ 11).
Mind you this is all in all normal, any safety norm or related technical specifications is (or should be) based on the "reasonable costs for society to obtain a reasonable increase in safety".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Consumer...
Pretty much that whole generation of midsize SUVs rolled easily. That's just one of the engineering trade-offs all those vehicles made and anyone can tell you that. If Consumer Reports was picking my SUV as the one to target I'd assemble a "get these people off our back" team too.
The media has made more than a few scandals out of pure normalcy over the years. The Frontline(?) gas cap thing comes to mind as a good example. Reality doesn't seem to matter nearly as much as the marketing team and lawyers you use to shape the public's perception is what matters. It's no wonder that corporations reaction to reported problems seems to always be to try to steamroll whomever is complaining and/or keep things on the down low.
Spin/media/marketing/CR/NHTSA after it's all public is a bigger subject, yes.
Sometime later he turns up at dinner with $200. "Where did you get that money?" His father asks.
"I sold raffle tickets for the donkey" his son replied.
"What?!?" Shouts his father. "You can't sell raffle tickets for a donkey that you know has already died! Weren't people mad?"
"Just the guy who won" said the son, "so I gave him his money back."
But with a raffle, the 'take' can easily exceed the cost of the prizes. So I guess the son would still make out ok.
If you can't sell a reliable car, don't make one?
Products fail sometimes and we in the tech-sphere get to laugh about it. No such thing as 100% failure proof. Customers that paid for the service would be angry but no doubt, they'd get their money back.
Yes they might have lost more, but that's the business sometimes.
What's missing is, some certification level that tells you how secure the data is. So you know what you're buying into?
Refunds are fine for retail customers, and most SLAs I’ve ever had the need to discuss seem to be based on that model.
If I buy a computer from you for $1000 and it breaks, I’m out $1000, I want my money back. Vendor might be fine with that. If I buy a commercial oven from you for $40,000 and it breaks I’m out the price of the oven, plus half of my sales for a week while it gets repaired, wages for people who are now half useless to my business, and loss of trust and/or customers for my company since I had none of my signature baked goods for the entire week.
I don’t want SLAs, I want a warranty. Insurance.
I'm not even a professional photographer and have about 2TiB of photographs.
This is barely data loss in the great scheme of things, but certainly a wake up call for Canon and their users.
People still die in risky surgeries. But we do them despite the risk on the consumer is them being dead.
> People still die in risky surgeries. But we do them despite the risk on the consumer is them being dead.
The risk of doing or not doing is death. I'm not sure this is the best analogy.
Cosmetic surgery...
When a restaurant takes your reservation for Friday night, there's a 0.00001% (or so) risk that they will burn down on Thursday or that half the staff will get heart attacks or something. Should they not do reservations at all?
It seems Canon did not have a backup, they had replication of data. If you are storing data for money, then this is a professionally negligent behavior. Not being able to prepare for everything is not an valid excuse to not prepare for what you reasonably can.
Also, reservations are free. It's not reasonable to expect restaurants to do anything and everything to honor 100% of reservations when many customers never show up for them and don't have any skin in the game anyway. Whatever point is trying to be made here is going out the window thanks to the "zero 9" nature of restaurant reservations. (Yes, not even 90% of restaurant reservations end up turning into actual paying tables.)
I don't know about you, but something doesn't seems right here. Just 10 TB of data? For me even 0.5TB is too much. Hech, 0.0001 is too much.
Put another way, while they seem to have fixed the immediate problem, no word on whether they are putting real BACKUP plans in place to avoid a similar problem happening and whipping out everything.
A risk analysis made by Ford was misinterpreted and seen as a calculated risk of recall vs settlements for injuries/death.
But It turns out it was mostly a hoax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet...
That retrospective analysis utterly misses the point: for the area they were responsible for, if the company knew they could do better and elected not to, then they got treated exactly as they should have.
Per the link posted by the GP the Pinto did not have any problems relative to other cars of the same type and era. Ford's "intent" (if you can call it that since they didn't know the future at the time) was to say "err, we don't really think there's a problem here so we'll pay out money when this happens but it's not recall worth" and the investigation bore that out which is why they were not found guilty. I don't really want to defend BigCo (or any other large group with diffuse responsibility) but it's 2020 and here I am.
>That retrospective analysis utterly misses the point: for the area they were responsible for, if the company knew they could do better and elected not to, then they got treated exactly as they should have.
Everyone could always do better on any given metric but the question is at what cost and with what tradeoffs. People buy compacts and subcompacts because they are cheap and fuel efficient. You could build a subcompact that just bounces when rear-ended by a freight train but nobody would buy that because it would cost a ton and weigh a ton (several tons actually) defeating the value proposition of a compact car.
Everyone can always do better, but everyone doesn't know exactly which of their decisions will end up killing another person. If you DO know that, then you're obligated to change things.
Even cyclists are not free from that risk - when I leave later and take my cargo bike to pick up my kid, I might be distracted in the wrong instant and run over someone else’s child. I try hard not to, but the safest way to reduce that risk would be to walk. Still, I don’t.
We all balance risks, even deadly ones, to us and others, all of the time.
That's very different to say, if you planned on reversing a car and decided it took too much effort to look behind you before you do. Sure - chances are most of the time you won't run over a child doing this...
We do it all the time?
How far are you from the nearest fire extinguisher? Can't that number be reduced? That is but one example.
I as an individual can take the risks I choose to take with my life. I have no right to apply that to others though.
In fact the building I'm currently in was built to local standards which mandated all sorts of things in relation to providing adequate control of known risks related to the spread of fire, and has smoke detectors fitted for that purpose. Because the builder of the house might have been okay accepting that risk for themselves, but we don't let them just pass it on to others.
Damn near every engineering decision could lead to some sequence of events that kills someone and given infinite time will eventually do so. This is a core concept of pretty much every ethics in engineering class that many people here have taken in order to obtain their degree.
Don't slap doors befitting a missile silo on your car? If your cars rick up enough miles someone's gonna die in a T-bone eventually.
Build an overpass with small beams and a support on the median instead of big expensive beams and no support? Someone's gonna hit that support eventually.
The sorts of excesses that can prevent unlikely deaths are justifiable in individual and in the abstract but at a societal level we cannot afford to think this way. As we get richer we can afford to hedge against more and more remote failure modes but even then at some point the risk is low enough.
In the 1950s we couldn't justify seat-belts in all cars. In the 1980s we couldn't justify making cars as rigid as we do today. Between wealth and technological progress things are generally getting better all the time but to hold the past to the standards of the present is asinine.
So yes.
But this data loss highlights that all too often it ends there, with calculating the risk of loss due to hardware or data centre failures.
You need to also do the same in terms assessing how you design your software, and what processes you put in place to mitigate risks.
In this case it was the software system design that failed: They allowed the system access to modify long term stored data, when really the system ought to have been designed to allow "write once unless the user has convinced us that they really, really want the data destroyed, in which case keep a backup for a limited time" type design.
A lot of software fails in that respect. The moment your internal API's allow modification of data, you risk catastrophic loss, as Canon found out, and you really ought to have strategies for mitigation of that.
You dont need that, but a backup ;)
In the end it's all a tradeoff... ignoring cost, we all know what to do to get pretty safe storage. But how much are you really willing to pay, per month, for that safety?
Thats why you backup the original data and NOT the downscaled etc one.
>But how much are you really willing to pay, per month, for that safety?
You have to backup ALL your customers data, otherwise DONT go into file-hosting business.
Not true, but you are resticted to the free 15Gb.
- privacy
- legal (GDPR)
- cost etc.
It's basically a "black swan" event, they designed their system without anticipating this particular failure mode. It's easy to claim in hindsight that "they should've or they should not go into that business" but seriously.... look in the mirror. Are you as tough on yourself when it comes to your customers? Can you honestly claim that there's absolutely no failure mode that could result in customer data loss?
Encryption?
> legal (GDPR)
You dont have to delete offline backups...never heard of such a case
> cost etc.
Cheaper than loose your customer's data wich they trust you with.
EDIT: If you can delete a backup it's not a backup.
There are alternatives (one of which is to encrypt the backed up data & just throw away the encryption keys instead) but of course those incur additional costs
> Cheaper than loose your customer's data wich they trust you with.
This is just opinion. And also it's heavily context-dependent(cost of losing customer data is not the same for all data or all businesses).
> EDIT: If you can delete a backup it's not a backup.
If it gets destroyed, is it a backup? How's that different from "delete"? Those were not intentionally deleted, they were accidentally destroyed. Can your backups be accidentally destroyed?
>>The key issue is to put the backup data ‘beyond use’, even if it cannot be immediately overwritten.
It's clear that you cannot delete WORM-tapen with many other data on it.
>This is just opinion.
Not for a file hosting service, the customer trusts you to do your job.
>If it gets destroyed, is it a backup?
Destroyed means physikal interaction, since it is not possible to make a reallife backup this is you last line of defence.
>Can your backups be accidentally destroyed?
Well if someone "accidentally" breaks into my bank opens the right tresor and "accidentally" uses a flametrower..the you are right.
> ie that the backup is simply held on your systems until it is replaced in line with an established schedule
Again, you can't keep backups forever, you are _required_ to delete them.
Also, not sure why you keep you backups in the bank (do you, really?) but even banks can suffer from fire/arson, explosion (accidental or not), or a number of other natural disasters (earthquake, flooding, etc).
[later edit] Also, sort of by definition, in all businesses customers trust you to do your job. Can you give an example of a business where customers don't typically trust you to do your job?
>Also, not sure why you keep you backups in the bank
Business backup's, secure, really good fireprotection, flood protection and in case of a Bus-hit-scenario someone else has access to it.
>Can you give an example of a business where customers don't typically trust you to do your job?
Politic and Canon filehosting from now on, Airbus Max and Foxnews ;)
> Politic and Canon filehosting from now on, Airbus Max and Foxnews ;)
I know it's tongue-in-cheek, but Foxnews viewers typically trust them, that's one of the problems, right? And customers (advertisers) obviously trust them to deliver message to audience.
Airbus is better trusted than ever, especially now after the 737 Max fiasco :P - but even Boeing was obviously trusted by their customers (whether that trust was misplaced is a different issue; my point was "customers must trust me" is in no way unique or particularly important for file hosting).
True true
"Canon has said that there is no technical measure to restore lost video files, but that photo files can be restored – albeit not at their original resolution."
Because I can assure you, from the perspective of someone who worked for >10 years in a backup related part of the storage industry, our product penetration covered a huge portion of public companies, and untold numbers of non public businesses. Given that we were one of a half dozen or so similar products and our competitors also had non-insignificant footprints in places we didn't most companies were taking backup of their core systems very seriously.
And even then, today, there are dozens of online backup services. There are plans which can backup a TB or two of data a year off a NAS/etc and provide a read only historical snapshot for the price of a couple starbucks coffees a month (and a reasonable internet connection). And then there are the dozens of mom & pop places which just use two or three ~$100 USB disks on a rotation with windows backup/time machine/whatever.
So, no, lack of a proper backup (and recovery) strategy isn't really a question of cost. Its more a question of the competencies of the individuals charged with configuring/maintaining the IT systems.
And sure, if you have .5PB+ of data that needs backing up, a tape library, or replicating dedupe appliance, software license, etc is going to cost $$$$ but overwhelmingly when compared with the overall IT budget for machines+storage+administrators those devices rarely crack double digit percentages of the yearly IT budgets. Further, there are ways to lower those costs even more with a bit of hunting on the resale markets where picking up a three year old piece of equipment for a tiny fraction of its original cost isn't unusual.