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So I have a backup tape store that I keep offsite in the same town. Then a nuke hits. You’ve always got a potential for a single event to knock out your backup

So I have a backup tape store that I keep offsite in the same town. Then a nuke hits. You’ve always got a potential for a single event to knock out your backup system, the question is what level of events are you happy with. My company is supposed to survive nuclear war, obviously many systems will be affected and may even be unrecoverable in a widespread nuclear attack, but that’s one extreme. At the other end a simple fire or natural disaster knocking out one cry would only cause limited loss of resilience and peak capacity. I suspect many smaller companies based in say New York have no plans on how to continue if the entire of NY was lost. An online backup in another city would be more useful than an offline backup in the same building for some types of loss (fire for example), but not for other types (ransom ware) Cyber attacks are nasty because unless you actually have restored your backups, they aren’t worth the tape they are printed on. They could have been corrupted ages ago. I’m sure everyone on HN has regular backup restore checks, but I doubt it’s ubiquitous in company’s with regimes in the 100-200m range. And while people may do some types of restore, how about restoring everything when you’ve lost everything but a few LTO tapes? How long would it take before you are back up. How long before you are hacked again? Then there’s insider threats. If your head of IT has his kids bundled into a van, what damage could he do to your network and data, how long would it take for you to recover.

WalterBright 3y ago
Some perspective: In Boeing airplane design, the philosophy is the aircraft must be able to survive any single failure of a component or system. Everything that is flight critical is redundant. But if the airplane flies into a cliff, or a missile hits it, there is no backup plan. Undergoing a ransomware attack is commonplace, and so a backup plan for that scenario should be a minimum standard. Surviving a nuclear attack is an unreasonable requirement for most operations.

WalterBright 3y ago

Some perspective: In Boeing airplane design, the philosophy is the aircraft must be able to survive any single failure of a component or system. Everything that is flight critical is redundant. But if the airplane flies into a cliff, or a missile hits it, there is no backup plan. Undergoing a ransomware attack is commonplace, and so a backup plan for that scenario should be a minimum standard. Surviving a nuclear attack is an unreasonable requirement for most operations.