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From what I have seen in most countries I have been in, it is very safe to assume that most of the offices (including government or small businesses) do not hav

From what I have seen in most countries I have been in, it is very safe to assume that most of the offices (including government or small businesses) do not have very good practices nor training regarding digital content or software security.

patio11 12y ago
Yep. This is also true about large companies and software startups. Pick any group of savvy technologists you want, then on the morning of their A round take the CEO's Macbook and throw it into the river. That should be a non-event. It is not.
- toxicFork 12y ago
  Ah yes, the river factor. The sister of the bus factor.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  And even people that think they're covered sometimes turn out not to be. "But I have a NAS with two hard drives and all my files are on it. That's my backup." "Yeah, the company that set it up did it wrong. Your files were spread across both drives, instead of copied to each drive. When one of the drives failed, all of your files went with it." "..." True story.
  - mnw21cam 12y ago
    Repeat after me: RAID is not backup.
    - thaumaturgy 12y ago
      You and I (and, hopefully, most of HN) are well aware. However, this was the very first business I had the pleasure of working with that had even attempted something resembling a comprehensive backup system, and the system they got was wrong.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      RAID 1 (or say RAID 1+5) sounds like a [local] backup to me - what am I missing. Are you just saying local backup is insufficient or is it something less obvious??
      - thaumaturgy 12y ago
        RAID (of any kind) isn't a backup because it doesn't store previous versions of files. For example, if your RAID 1, 5, 6, 10, etc. array is attached as a Windows shared network drive -- which is not uncommon -- then CryptoLocker can find it, silently encrypt every single .doc, .pdf, .jpg, etc. file on it, and you're still boned because you don't have a copy of those files before they were changed. Less dramatically, sometimes people make mistakes, like editing a document, then fat-fingering a mass deletion in the document during the save process and not noticing it until a month later. Again, RAID doesn't protect you from that, but a proper backup system does. And finally, it's not unheard-of for RAID systems of any kind to just fall over. Even a RAID 10 is a whole lot of redundancy all running on a single drive controller; if that drive controller does something very silly -- and I've seen it happen, we've personally shipped systems to data recovery outfits for this -- then you can end up with garbage on all of your drives. There are two different concepts at work here. "Redundancy" and "High Availability". RAID uses redundancy, but it belongs under "High Availability" -- it's a system that's designed to still be mostly available even if it suffers a hardware failure. But strictly speaking it does not provide for redundancy of your data.
        pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        Ha, lol, yes mirroring rather than backup. Have made the same comments as you per dropbox. Mirroring, eg RAID 1, provides some hardware redundancy; it's an entirely incomplete backup that is easily made useless. It's more like having a spare-tyre when what you really need is a spare car. Point entirely accepted but I can't help feel there is a deficiency in the language here - a hardware failover is a backup of a sort; it's not a sufficient backup to address even most potential failures.
        thaumaturgy 12y ago

patio11 12y ago

Yep. This is also true about large companies and software startups. Pick any group of savvy technologists you want, then on the morning of their A round take the CEO's Macbook and throw it into the river. That should be a non-event. It is not.

toxicFork 12y ago
Ah yes, the river factor. The sister of the bus factor.
thaumaturgy 12y ago
And even people that think they're covered sometimes turn out not to be. "But I have a NAS with two hard drives and all my files are on it. That's my backup." "Yeah, the company that set it up did it wrong. Your files were spread across both drives, instead of copied to each drive. When one of the drives failed, all of your files went with it." "..." True story.
- mnw21cam 12y ago
  Repeat after me: RAID is not backup.
  - thaumaturgy 12y ago
    You and I (and, hopefully, most of HN) are well aware. However, this was the very first business I had the pleasure of working with that had even attempted something resembling a comprehensive backup system, and the system they got was wrong.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    RAID 1 (or say RAID 1+5) sounds like a [local] backup to me - what am I missing. Are you just saying local backup is insufficient or is it something less obvious??
    - thaumaturgy 12y ago
      RAID (of any kind) isn't a backup because it doesn't store previous versions of files. For example, if your RAID 1, 5, 6, 10, etc. array is attached as a Windows shared network drive -- which is not uncommon -- then CryptoLocker can find it, silently encrypt every single .doc, .pdf, .jpg, etc. file on it, and you're still boned because you don't have a copy of those files before they were changed. Less dramatically, sometimes people make mistakes, like editing a document, then fat-fingering a mass deletion in the document during the save process and not noticing it until a month later. Again, RAID doesn't protect you from that, but a proper backup system does. And finally, it's not unheard-of for RAID systems of any kind to just fall over. Even a RAID 10 is a whole lot of redundancy all running on a single drive controller; if that drive controller does something very silly -- and I've seen it happen, we've personally shipped systems to data recovery outfits for this -- then you can end up with garbage on all of your drives. There are two different concepts at work here. "Redundancy" and "High Availability". RAID uses redundancy, but it belongs under "High Availability" -- it's a system that's designed to still be mostly available even if it suffers a hardware failure. But strictly speaking it does not provide for redundancy of your data.
      - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        Ha, lol, yes mirroring rather than backup. Have made the same comments as you per dropbox. Mirroring, eg RAID 1, provides some hardware redundancy; it's an entirely incomplete backup that is easily made useless. It's more like having a spare-tyre when what you really need is a spare car. Point entirely accepted but I can't help feel there is a deficiency in the language here - a hardware failover is a backup of a sort; it's not a sufficient backup to address even most potential failures.
        thaumaturgy 12y ago