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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
They literally use the word "backup." I wouldn't _normally_ expect snapshots to function as backups, but once they market them as such, I do. Yeah, sure, it's probably yet another case of a sales team getting over eager and taking over the company, but that's why if you value your ethics _at all_ you keep tabs on WTF the sales are doing.
So you're saying, against your admission of knowing better, that you can be literally swayed that a snapshot is a proper backup in the independent-of-the-original-storage sense, because their documentation equated the two?
The difference between a snapshot being a backup and not being a backup is literally the guarantees made by the provider. If the snapshot feature is documented as a backup, it is DOCUMENTED AS A BACKUP. Unless, of course, I suspect the provider of using the words as a way of confusing me, BUT THAT'S BAD. Like go read yourself a few times, you're literally defending them by claiming it's reasonable to treat them like scammers.
They can document it as anything.
A backup has to be isolated; different physical location, different medium, different provider. What if the technical infrastructure works as advertised, but the company goes into receivership for whatever reason?
Having cloud provider X say they moved the bits from one place to another should not be considered a backup by anyone, regardless of what they advertise.
>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.
IIRC you can do this by using AWS Backup. There's a setting in the... Plan? Policy? Sorry, it's been a while and there was a weird mismatch between the terraform documentation and the official Amazon documentation... anyways, there's a setting somewhere that says to move the backup to cold storage after a certain amount of time.
- 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.
