5 ms·

One example of why you should do your own back-ups

45 points by oliverdamian 15y ago

viana007 15y ago
I've seen similar cases in the past. In one case, I did web scraping, using Google's cache to recover partially.
- paultz 15y ago
  yes but you have to be quick also wayback machine has a copy dated 6th june 2011
pan69 15y ago
It's pretty unbelievable that a hosting company like that doesn't make backups for their customers by default. Even if the guy didn't follow the "instructions" to the letter you can still assume that the hosting company are the experts here. And why are these guys physically deleting files on cancellation of an account? Pretty amateur if you'd ask me.
- soldermont00 15y ago
  They're going to sue you now too. ;-)
- hartror 15y ago
  In their press release[1] they say they do make backups for their customers by default except in cases where the size of the backup exceeds a certain threshold which happened in this case. Supposedly the customer was notified of this in writing and acknowledged. Discontinuing backups and deleting data on account cancellation seem like reasonable acts to me. It is a sorry case but it sounds like misunderstanding by the customer, though the process seems a touch messy and could be improved. Hopefully that will be VentraIP's take away from this, though they probably won't acknowledge this if legal action is pending. [1] http://www.ventraip.com.au/files/pr-tvc-130212.pdf http://www.ventraip.com.au/files/pr-tvc-130212.pdf
- marcosvm 15y ago
  As I see they are not taking care of their customers. If just have a retention policy of the data after the cancelation, let's say for 3 days, or a week, the problem could have being avoided. Win-win situation.
- rickmb 15y ago
  Here's why a hosting company doesn't make backups by default: it costs money. You can either be a premium hosting party where the service is all inclusive, or you can offer your services a la carte, where customers can choose what they want and pay for. Both are valid business models, either way, TANSTAFL. It's up to the customer to choose. Why would a business give shit away for free after the client made their choice not to buy it? And as far as I can tell they didn't "physically delete files", they just pulled the plug on a VPS as per the clients requests. You think being able to terminate an EC2 instance is amateurish from Amazon?
yabai 15y ago
So the message is...do your own backups and hire an attorney to do the rest!
- oliverdamian 15y ago
  Or have something like the EFF but focused on young web businesses which could be funded by web business elders [those who already made money from the common web ecosystem] to protect the rights of web businesses especially those who are just starting-up and to advocate/design/lobby for legal systems that are conducive to the web ecosystem as a whole. For legal practitioners, this would arguably be a better place to work for(if one can earn a living from it) rather than let's say working for patent trolls.
keypusher 15y ago
It says right at the top that the owner "has limited tech knowledge". It's clear that he suffered the cost of trusting his hosting company to do this for him, but the real problem here seems to be trying to run a large website as a business without having any idea how it works.
dekz 15y ago
Wow this is just silly. This event could've easily been avoided and all this VentraIP company has gained is a shitstorm. Surely this host could have a process where the migration from one account to another requires the data be transferred before any account cancellation and deletion. Stop playing the blame game and think of how you should treat your customers. The posts from the VentraIP representatives on the Whirlpool forums are also childish. Companies like this make me sad to be in the Australia IT sector.
- hartror 15y ago
  It definitely seems like VentraIP could improve their communications as it seems the migration process is separate from the old account cancellation processes (from what I have read across the forums and their press releases). So a misunderstanding on the clients behalf caused them to delete the site before he asked for the migration to go ahead.
- redslazer 15y ago
  I am a customer of ventraip but only for my budget sites. They have built a very good dashboard which allows you to do most of what you would need. If you try to do something is that is not built into the dashboard it becomes extremly difficult and their customer service is often of no help. Having had to transfer one of my domains from there economy plan to a business plan. I had to cancel the economy plan first to disconnect the domain and then add it to the new server. If i had no been technically proficient and been aware that i needed to take a cpanel backup before deleting the account so as to be able to restore it, i would have been in the same position as this gentleman. Ventraip really causes shockwaves in the Australia hosting industry because the competition is overprices and inefficient. There system worked well while only technically capable people used them but once you have beginners using your system you better make it fool proof. I hope they learn a lot from this debacle.
ghshephard 15y ago
Let's be clear - nobody cares about backups. Any seasoned SysAdmin (That is, one who has been axed, or been on a team where someone was axed for not having a proper recovery process in place) will tell you that restores (and the testing of said restores) is what is essential. Weekly/monthly testing of restores is critical - preferably in an automated fashion. People would be amazed to know how many large enterprises have invested 10s of millions of dollars in large tape array/robots, which they religiously back up petabytes of data to, without actually knowing whether they'll be able to restore properly should the day come that they need to.
- harshreality 15y ago
  As an example of why this is so important, consider a classic case: Amazon's May 1997 database snafu, documented by Jeremiah Wilton at http://www.bluegecko.net/news-events/new-whitepaper-the-dba-disaster-diary-double-failure/ http://www.bluegecko.net/news-events/new-whitepaper-the-dba-... Frequent automated restoration and testing of database backups would have avoided the downtime. Amazon would have noticed the Oracle bug soon after the extents change, and would have had a chance to identify and work around it before taking down the production database for routine maintenance. Furthermore, by using their backup DEC storage array for the routine backup restoration tests, they would have identified their new DEC storage array as faulty before they put it into production use.
- andrewflnr 15y ago
  Okay, total sysadmin noob here: how do you usually test restoration? If I was to test HDD image restoration on my laptop, for example, and it didn't work, I would be doubly up a creek, because not only is my disk hosed, but I've just proven I can't restore it. On our home server it's not quite as bad, but there's only so much you can do with dry runs. I suppose if it's just the files you're interested in, it's not as hard, but much more of a pain if you mess up your OS.
  - larrys 15y ago
    A hard drive with multiple partitions or another boot drive would be a good start. A good tool for the Mac by the way (if you use OSX) is "Super Duper" which will clone your hard drive. Then you can simply pick the cloned drive as your boot drive and if it boots you will know you have a good backup. That is how I test that my backup works. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription... When I was recently traveling I took several pocket hard drives with clones of my laptop drive so if the drive failed (or the laptop failed) I could hook the hard drive up to another laptop (one rented or purchased) and boot from that.
notatoad 15y ago
also an example of why you shouldn't be a moron. the host instructed him to cancel his service before he was migrated over to a new server, and he did? what the hell was he thinking? not saying the host is innocent here, but the 'victim' is really only a victim of his own stupidity.
- larrys 15y ago
  Based on my experience with end users I wouldn't call his behavior moronic. I would say it's about average. We regularly have people who go into their accounts and change dns without realizing what that means. They only know that either the web "guy" or the new host told them to do that. Or they read they should do that in the setup instructions. They may not have purchased email service at the new host and they think that everything will just work. Many times if they speak to 1st level tech support at the new host they don't know enough to even know what will or will not happen with a dns server change.
jkahn 15y ago
It's not surprising that this has now made it international. If you read into the history, the guy clearly did not follow basic instructions. Backups are not part of the service he bought; yet the host backed up anyway. The host informed him that backups were disabled on this account because it was over quota and he did nothing to resolve the situation. He took no backups of his own. He only lost his data because he failed to follow instructions or respond to emails and subsequently cancelled his shared hosting account before the data had been migrated over to a new VPS service. I think the hosting company were in the right here. Here's the forum thread for those that are interested: http://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=5572 http://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=5572
rokhayakebe 15y ago
Man, Godaddy pulled a similar trick on me. It was totally our fault that we screwed up our server, and things were in a limbo. Their advise was to provisionne a new server. I asked them about the data, they told me it was gone, and that's why I need to backup. I had to fight back and forth and ensure we didn't provisionne a new server. They were CONVINCED the data was gone. After a small fix from our end, the data was back and everything ok. Had I followed their advise, one year of daily work would have been poof gone. Incompetent.

45 points by oliverdamian 15y ago

viana007 15y ago

I've seen similar cases in the past. In one case, I did web scraping, using Google's cache to recover partially.

paultz 15y ago
yes but you have to be quick also wayback machine has a copy dated 6th june 2011

pan69 15y ago

It's pretty unbelievable that a hosting company like that doesn't make backups for their customers by default. Even if the guy didn't follow the "instructions" to the letter you can still assume that the hosting company are the experts here. And why are these guys physically deleting files on cancellation of an account? Pretty amateur if you'd ask me.

soldermont00 15y ago
They're going to sue you now too. ;-)
hartror 15y ago
In their press release[1] they say they do make backups for their customers by default except in cases where the size of the backup exceeds a certain threshold which happened in this case. Supposedly the customer was notified of this in writing and acknowledged. Discontinuing backups and deleting data on account cancellation seem like reasonable acts to me. It is a sorry case but it sounds like misunderstanding by the customer, though the process seems a touch messy and could be improved. Hopefully that will be VentraIP's take away from this, though they probably won't acknowledge this if legal action is pending. [1] http://www.ventraip.com.au/files/pr-tvc-130212.pdf http://www.ventraip.com.au/files/pr-tvc-130212.pdf
marcosvm 15y ago
As I see they are not taking care of their customers. If just have a retention policy of the data after the cancelation, let's say for 3 days, or a week, the problem could have being avoided. Win-win situation.
rickmb 15y ago
Here's why a hosting company doesn't make backups by default: it costs money. You can either be a premium hosting party where the service is all inclusive, or you can offer your services a la carte, where customers can choose what they want and pay for. Both are valid business models, either way, TANSTAFL. It's up to the customer to choose. Why would a business give shit away for free after the client made their choice not to buy it? And as far as I can tell they didn't "physically delete files", they just pulled the plug on a VPS as per the clients requests. You think being able to terminate an EC2 instance is amateurish from Amazon?

yabai 15y ago

So the message is...do your own backups and hire an attorney to do the rest!

oliverdamian 15y ago
Or have something like the EFF but focused on young web businesses which could be funded by web business elders [those who already made money from the common web ecosystem] to protect the rights of web businesses especially those who are just starting-up and to advocate/design/lobby for legal systems that are conducive to the web ecosystem as a whole. For legal practitioners, this would arguably be a better place to work for(if one can earn a living from it) rather than let's say working for patent trolls.

keypusher 15y ago

It says right at the top that the owner "has limited tech knowledge". It's clear that he suffered the cost of trusting his hosting company to do this for him, but the real problem here seems to be trying to run a large website as a business without having any idea how it works.

dekz 15y ago

Wow this is just silly. This event could've easily been avoided and all this VentraIP company has gained is a shitstorm. Surely this host could have a process where the migration from one account to another requires the data be transferred before any account cancellation and deletion. Stop playing the blame game and think of how you should treat your customers. The posts from the VentraIP representatives on the Whirlpool forums are also childish. Companies like this make me sad to be in the Australia IT sector.

hartror 15y ago
It definitely seems like VentraIP could improve their communications as it seems the migration process is separate from the old account cancellation processes (from what I have read across the forums and their press releases). So a misunderstanding on the clients behalf caused them to delete the site before he asked for the migration to go ahead.
redslazer 15y ago
I am a customer of ventraip but only for my budget sites. They have built a very good dashboard which allows you to do most of what you would need. If you try to do something is that is not built into the dashboard it becomes extremly difficult and their customer service is often of no help. Having had to transfer one of my domains from there economy plan to a business plan. I had to cancel the economy plan first to disconnect the domain and then add it to the new server. If i had no been technically proficient and been aware that i needed to take a cpanel backup before deleting the account so as to be able to restore it, i would have been in the same position as this gentleman. Ventraip really causes shockwaves in the Australia hosting industry because the competition is overprices and inefficient. There system worked well while only technically capable people used them but once you have beginners using your system you better make it fool proof. I hope they learn a lot from this debacle.

ghshephard 15y ago

Let's be clear - nobody cares about backups. Any seasoned SysAdmin (That is, one who has been axed, or been on a team where someone was axed for not having a proper recovery process in place) will tell you that restores (and the testing of said restores) is what is essential. Weekly/monthly testing of restores is critical - preferably in an automated fashion. People would be amazed to know how many large enterprises have invested 10s of millions of dollars in large tape array/robots, which they religiously back up petabytes of data to, without actually knowing whether they'll be able to restore properly should the day come that they need to.

harshreality 15y ago
As an example of why this is so important, consider a classic case: Amazon's May 1997 database snafu, documented by Jeremiah Wilton at http://www.bluegecko.net/news-events/new-whitepaper-the-dba-disaster-diary-double-failure/ http://www.bluegecko.net/news-events/new-whitepaper-the-dba-... Frequent automated restoration and testing of database backups would have avoided the downtime. Amazon would have noticed the Oracle bug soon after the extents change, and would have had a chance to identify and work around it before taking down the production database for routine maintenance. Furthermore, by using their backup DEC storage array for the routine backup restoration tests, they would have identified their new DEC storage array as faulty before they put it into production use.
andrewflnr 15y ago
Okay, total sysadmin noob here: how do you usually test restoration? If I was to test HDD image restoration on my laptop, for example, and it didn't work, I would be doubly up a creek, because not only is my disk hosed, but I've just proven I can't restore it. On our home server it's not quite as bad, but there's only so much you can do with dry runs. I suppose if it's just the files you're interested in, it's not as hard, but much more of a pain if you mess up your OS.
- larrys 15y ago
  A hard drive with multiple partitions or another boot drive would be a good start. A good tool for the Mac by the way (if you use OSX) is "Super Duper" which will clone your hard drive. Then you can simply pick the cloned drive as your boot drive and if it boots you will know you have a good backup. That is how I test that my backup works. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription... When I was recently traveling I took several pocket hard drives with clones of my laptop drive so if the drive failed (or the laptop failed) I could hook the hard drive up to another laptop (one rented or purchased) and boot from that.

notatoad 15y ago

also an example of why you shouldn't be a moron. the host instructed him to cancel his service before he was migrated over to a new server, and he did? what the hell was he thinking? not saying the host is innocent here, but the 'victim' is really only a victim of his own stupidity.

larrys 15y ago
Based on my experience with end users I wouldn't call his behavior moronic. I would say it's about average. We regularly have people who go into their accounts and change dns without realizing what that means. They only know that either the web "guy" or the new host told them to do that. Or they read they should do that in the setup instructions. They may not have purchased email service at the new host and they think that everything will just work. Many times if they speak to 1st level tech support at the new host they don't know enough to even know what will or will not happen with a dns server change.

jkahn 15y ago

It's not surprising that this has now made it international. If you read into the history, the guy clearly did not follow basic instructions. Backups are not part of the service he bought; yet the host backed up anyway. The host informed him that backups were disabled on this account because it was over quota and he did nothing to resolve the situation. He took no backups of his own. He only lost his data because he failed to follow instructions or respond to emails and subsequently cancelled his shared hosting account before the data had been migrated over to a new VPS service. I think the hosting company were in the right here. Here's the forum thread for those that are interested: http://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=5572 http://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=5572

rokhayakebe 15y ago

Man, Godaddy pulled a similar trick on me. It was totally our fault that we screwed up our server, and things were in a limbo. Their advise was to provisionne a new server. I asked them about the data, they told me it was gone, and that's why I need to backup. I had to fight back and forth and ensure we didn't provisionne a new server. They were CONVINCED the data was gone. After a small fix from our end, the data was back and everything ok. Had I followed their advise, one year of daily work would have been poof gone. Incompetent.