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Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

If you pay a company to do backups, is it unreasonable to expect those backups to be at least basic 3-2-1 backups?

I'd say you would hope to receive that, but in reality you don't. For Google Cloud and AWS, even a "multi-AZ" deployment might mean that it's just 2 servers in the same building, i.e. exactly what OVH is accused of here. For example, see this discussion about Google's Paris disaster:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35711349

and especially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713001

And here for AWS multi-AZ losing data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4115937

I fully agree with you that OVH did a bad job. But so do all the other cloud providers. Cloud just means "someone else's computer" and you still need a watertight contract and the legal ability to sue them to make sure they uphold their end of the contract.

> And here for AWS multi-AZ losing data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4115937

That link is from 2012, 13 years ago.

AFAIK as of today AWS provides strong guarantees about the AZs being physically, network, and power isolated of each other.

They certainly say that. But it might turn out to be a lie, just like it did with OVH and Google.

I think that there's enough evidence that AZs are kms apart.

It is, but did the customers who lose data pay OVH for backups? I use OVH for at least 10 years now, and I never had any backups by them.

Despite the rebranding in 2019, they started as and still mostly are hosting providers, not the usual cloud.

OVH was not paid for backups. They sell access to VPS without backups

Reply on news.ycombinator.com