6 ms·

No you don't. While agree everyone should have their own backups, you should expect your hosting company to properly replicate and backup their datacenters.

anarcat 7y ago
I don't, actually, expect them to do so. But even if I would, and Gandi, here, were doing backups and replications, no one is immune from errors and catastrophes. 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...
- alpaca128 7y ago
  > Gandi, here, were doing backups and replications 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.
  - martius 7y ago
    Where does this come from?
  - notyourday 7y ago
    That's probably because they bought into the sales pitches of the likes of EMC. It's a nice pitch and in most of the cases it works exactly like EMC promises. Snapshots work great, data is always recovered, etc, etc, etc. 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.
tbyehl 7y ago
That is not the industry standard for web hosting. Never has been, never will be. 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.
- rahuldottech 7y ago
  In this case, the customer did pay for it: https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/1215208387169980416 https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12152083871699804... See full thread. Snapshots are marketed as backups.
  - tbyehl 7y ago
    So? 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.
    - marcinzm 7y ago
      >snapshot doesn't provide any protection from a failure in the underlying storage 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.
      - rob-olmos 7y ago
        How do you move your EBS snapshots to Glacier?
        icebraining 7y ago
        Use an Amazon S3 lifecycle.
champtar 7y ago
AWS recently had data loss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20875489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20875489
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  I'd be interested in more on this claim. - 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.

anarcat 7y ago

I don't, actually, expect them to do so. But even if I would, and Gandi, here, were doing backups and replications, no one is immune from errors and catastrophes. 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...

alpaca128 7y ago
> Gandi, here, were doing backups and replications 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.
- martius 7y ago
  Where does this come from?
- notyourday 7y ago
  That's probably because they bought into the sales pitches of the likes of EMC. It's a nice pitch and in most of the cases it works exactly like EMC promises. Snapshots work great, data is always recovered, etc, etc, etc. 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.

tbyehl 7y ago

That is not the industry standard for web hosting. Never has been, never will be. 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.

rahuldottech 7y ago
In this case, the customer did pay for it: https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/1215208387169980416 https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12152083871699804... See full thread. Snapshots are marketed as backups.
- tbyehl 7y ago
  So? 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.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    >snapshot doesn't provide any protection from a failure in the underlying storage 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.
    - rob-olmos 7y ago
      How do you move your EBS snapshots to Glacier?
      - icebraining 7y ago
        Use an Amazon S3 lifecycle.

champtar 7y ago

AWS recently had data loss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20875489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20875489

privateSFacct 7y ago
I'd be interested in more on this claim. - 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.