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You're Backing Up for the Wrong Disaster

You’re Backing Up for the Wrong Disaster

Section titled “You’re Backing Up for the Wrong Disaster”

  • We subconsciously focus on “movie-like” threats, like some evil hacker bringing down a server from his dark basement. Or hijacking and then deleting important data by using some secret NSA/CIA backdoor in the operating system. Or an earthquake destroying your datacenter. While in real life it’s probably something much more prosaic: untested code, a tired sysadmin, a user deleting their own files, a developer commiting code to the wrong branch, an angry ex-employee deleting stuff after being let go…
  • 50% - accidental deletion by a user • 33% - accidental deletion by our own engineers
  • Like, here’s a phrase I’ve heard countless times:

    “I don’t need to backup Amazon S3 because Amazon S3 is like 99.99999-something durable” Yeah, right. And because your users never delete anything by accident. And because your developers make zero mistakes when writing code.