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Comment by Magicrafter13 | Hacker News Reader

> These archives represent an important part of our region’s history, and we look forward to ensuring their preservation and protection through the Court-approved process.

Apparently you didn't find them important enough to have backups. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in net income and they couldn't afford a cheap NAS with 4 disks. Incredible.

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They did, they contracted with a vendor to store and backup the data. If that is insufficient then just about every customer of AWS, Azure, GCP, OCP, and every other managed storage provider is guilty of the same sin.

I have to agree with GP here, this is pretty incredible. They contracted with a vendor to store their data, not to back it up. It's not a backup if you can lose it in the same instant you lose the data.

You're right, they are. If your data can't survive a single storage host vanishing from existence, you don't have a backup. If your data can't survive one predictable or regularly occurring catastrophic act of nature, you don't have a backup. If your data can't survive a piece of malware -- with all of the credentials you have -- erasing it, you don't have a backup.

EDIT: Also, if you don't regularly test that your backups actually work, you probably don't have a backup. Lots of companies learn that one the hard way.

If you do not have at least one, but usually two copies of a backup in your physical possession, you do not have a backup. |o-o|

> If that is insufficient then just about every customer of AWS, Azure, GCP, OCP, and every other managed storage provider is guilty of the same sin.

Yes, they are as guilty! You say that as if it's a ridiculous assertion. Have you not read the occasional HN submission where someone is locked out of their cloud provider for dubious reasons?

A single vendor to handle the primary storage and all backups is insufficient for your most critical data.

But where are you seeing this vendor was tasked with backups? This looks like a single copy situation.

That's not a backup, that was their only copy of the data.

2 is one, and 1 is none.

I wouldn't hire someone with this mindset of yours to run the IT at my company, we'd lose data for sure.

Then that is just the 1 in 3-2-1 backups, and neglecting the 3 & 2 is a sin (wrt backup strategies).

I wonder the proportion of companies who store backups with a minimum of two separate vendors. Low?

They don't even need another vendor, they could literally have their own on-site copy. Then they not only have 2 copies of the data, but they're in geographically distinct locations, so an 'act of God' wouldn't take out the data either (unless that act was the entire world being destroyed, but I digress).

I don't understand why you were downvoted. There is no excuse for them to not have local copies. In the context of video production 55TB is nothing. They must have local storage that's significantly larger than that already.

Probably mostly by people who recognize that they are in the same situation but don't want to come to terms with the fact that their data is not safe.

Though, most individuals at least have the financial excuse. This station did not. (In fact, long term, a local copy of the data would cost significantly less than a monthly/yearly billed cloud storage provider.)

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