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I've never seen that. The only moment I needed a university backup was when a university unit specialized in IT (making websites, databases...) lost 3 months of

by ta988 6y ago

I've never seen that. The only moment I needed a university backup was when a university unit specialized in IT (making websites, databases...) lost 3 months of work on a system they were managing and that we needed to migrate from (to get rid of them and their incompetence). The deal was for them to give us the data on that day, theu just nuked the db, and recycled the hard drives. There were supposedly backups University wide, so I just asked the service handling it (another one) to send me the backups. Thats when they discovered that no backup worked for the last few months for the whole university... Don't ever trust your university with data. Make yourself multiple backups, encrypt them and keep a copy of the key/password in a safe place. I have horror stories linked to each of these reasons. One fun one was the single backup that was plugged when a user opened a "fedex" email and got a cryptolocker that locked all the network drives and the backup. Thankfully the person managing the networked drives had off site backups (and archiving).

dspillett 6y ago
> Don't ever trust your university with data. Make yourself multiple backups More generally: make sure you DR plan, even the simple "I have a backup" one that most people use, involves a second provider (which in some circumstances is your own local resources). Even if the people keeping your data safe on a daily basis are entirely competent, bad things can happen and with centralised control they can happen to many people at once. Even if all the data can be restored you may not be a priority so if you need urgent access to the data having on off-provider copy you can take it from is a godsend. Of course in a commercial setting or some university/research settings, maintaining an off-provider copy of any data may be a _massive_ policy breach. Or even a legal problem is it involves personal or other sensitive data.

by ta988 6y ago

dspillett 6y ago

> Don't ever trust your university with data. Make yourself multiple backups More generally: make sure you DR plan, even the simple "I have a backup" one that most people use, involves a second provider (which in some circumstances is your own local resources). Even if the people keeping your data safe on a daily basis are entirely competent, bad things can happen and with centralised control they can happen to many people at once. Even if all the data can be restored you may not be a priority so if you need urgent access to the data having on off-provider copy you can take it from is a godsend. Of course in a commercial setting or some university/research settings, maintaining an off-provider copy of any data may be a _massive_ policy breach. Or even a legal problem is it involves personal or other sensitive data.