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Comment by DrRobinson | Hacker News Reader

> Definitely not "close to useless".

It lowers the risk a minimum amount (which makes it not useless, but close to it.) Your resources are limited, so you want to prioritize actions that have good cost:benefit ratio.

Re-encrypting disks is a significant effort (cost), effort that could be spent on something with better benefit. Should you spend a day encrypting a database or should you spend it on looking over publicly exposed S3 buckets? Ideally both, but resources are limited. Doing one action always means you're putting off something else.

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This is a different argument.

Did you see other comments in this thread, for example someone bought a drive online and turned out it still had some backblaze data?

Compliance often has a bunch of useless checkboxing, but in that case it really mattered.

I heard a rumor that some companies had their backups "in the other tower". People won't be making that mistake again.

In some places they have a policy against two key people being on the same plane. It's ridiculous, until it isn't.

Obviously there are priorities. But you can't say "I need to add features, not unit tests, because the company will go under without these features implemented very soon, and therefore unit tests are close to useless".

> This is a different argument.

Part of it, maybe. But the point about it reducing risk by very little is true.

> Did you see other comments in this thread, for example someone bought a drive online and turned out it still had some backblaze data?

Backblaze data is encrypted, or so they claim. Backblaze is also not hosted on AWS. I've also yet to see any evidence of that claim, though I don't dismiss it.

Data is sharded/spread out over multiple disks, you don't have one disk per customer and have all their data there. You'd get fragments of data. If Backblaze was running their servers on specific disks that were not encrypted, not zeroed, and not destroyed, that'll have to stand for them. Backblaze is hosted in a shared data center/colocation, while AWS has their own data centers with their own personnel. Backblaze is a separate company from AWS.

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