3 copies

2 formats

1 copy off-site

The cloud is a great place for that 1 off-site copy.

The vast majority of the world would be much better served by (to appropriate your jargon) a 2-1-1 rule, because it's a straightforward treatment for a straightforward problem that is easily implemented. Yes, "format skew" and double-failure of backup solutions does indeed happen, but at a much lower incidence than "oh crap I deleted it!".

This protects against data corruption that is not detected immediately.

Another common way of doing this (and one that I prefer) is one where you rotate out a backup medium with ever larger intervals. So one gets set aside per week, then one gets set aside per month and so on. That gives you a series of snapshots in time that will allow you to pinpoint with some accuracy when an event happened. Longer ago you'll have less accuracy but this can help a lot in trying to triangulate who or what messed up. Just being able to answer the question of whether or not 'x' happened before 'y' was hired or after can help in narrowing down the number of suspects in case of a breach or other nastiness. It also prevents against back-ups for whatever reason not wanting to be reloaded (and you should guard against that by loading your back-up immediately after you make it, even so, the medium might fail the next time you try a read).

Better still if there is a streaming log of everything but only very few companies can afford that sort of solution for all their data. Those can be hard to restore from (by replaying) so there too a snapshot system can help.

But if you're going to condense it to a "rule" that will help people not well-versed in the field, that rule can only be "MAKE BACKUPS!", because at least 90% of the data loss scenarios in the real world happen because simple backups weren't made.

Don't make it more complicated than it is, because someone will stop to do it "right" and then lose data because they didn't just make a copy on a USB stick.

3 backup services 2 formats 1 local copy

I guess that could get expensive depending on the services.

For each business this is a delicate affair and you should spend some time on figuring out what you really absolutely have to have and what you could lose without losing the company or getting in trouble with the law.

There's risks and then there's risks. As always, you can spend some time and money to mitigate some risk, and decide some risk is low enough that you don't care to mitigate it. I wouldn't just assume one risk vector is higher than another without some concrete numbers.

What are the risks of having a bad health issue happen to you? Are you insured?

I'll bet that you don't know the answers to any of those questions, and yet, you are probably insured against all of them.

As for your question in more detail: it happens often enough that for me if you operate your business 'in the cloud' and you don't have a back-up of your data outside of the cloud to guard against catastrophic data loss due to either malice or accident that I'll happily fail you. Think 'sysadmin was depressive, wiped out company' (or maybe you let him/her go and they took revenge or any one of a number of other scenarios that would instantly terminate your existence online if you had not guarded against it).

Risk management is consequences * incidence versus cost to mitigate. If the cost to mitigate is negligible, the risk is measureable and the consequences are terminal then it is a no-brainer to protect yourself against this. At least one of my customers wished they had set up a backup facility for their critical data (too bad, end of story for them) and there is one published case that we all know about. That's two that you can count on and most likely other trouble shooters have similar stories.

I see catastrophic cloud data loss as having a much higher chance of happening than many other items on the list of stuff that I verify before greenlighting an investment.

Though if we unbox that a bit... How do we balance the risk of loss due to your cloud being owned vs. loss due to the risk of your users' PII being violated if someone attacks your in-house (ostensibly in-house reliability and security-managed) copies? Better make sure you're spending the money on security best-practices on all your copies, not just the "live" ones.

Side-note: What are your thoughts on two separate cloud providers as providing sufficient insurance? Say, having your data live in Google Cloud and at rest in Amazon S3?

Having two cloud providers would work assuming they don't share any critical infra-structure and assuming that it is not the same set of employees that have access to both systems. Also helps if you have a totally separate set of credentials for the back-up system and if that back-up system can only be unlocked by very senior people (preferably execs) after a catastrophe of suitable magnitude hits.

Whether you store your primary in the cloud or your back-up in the cloud the story is the same: have a copy somewhere else.

Finally: the only real back-up is one that is off-line. So from that (ok, ultra-paranoid) viewpoint it would be best if you actually went to an off-line medium to store your data in such a way that nobody can wipe it all out without physically destroying all copies.

All this of course after suitably weighing the importance of the data.

"Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point, the cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in an irreversible position both financially and in terms of ongoing credibility. As such at this point in time we have no alternative but to cease trading and concentrate on supporting our affected customers in exporting any remaining data they have left with us."

They promised a follow up once they got to the bottom of what happened but they never did, I'm still curious what the whole story was.

I can make this even easier. Its almost certainly going to boil down to this question. Have you ever lost even a single byte of data? Cause if you have, you aren't even in the same ballpark.

Have you ever been killed in a car accident? No? Then I guess you don't need a seatbelt, right? Has your house been burnt down by a lightning strike? No? Then no lightning rods and proper grounding for you, right?

You don't wait until a disaster occurs before you put a disaster recovery plan in place.

So getting back to risk management. So we about to make a QB selection for the big game. Now that we understand that the implementation of folks like jaque here are like the 12 year old pee wee standout vs. the cloud provider's seasoned NFL quarterback. Which one do you pick to safe guard your business.

This is just alarmism. If you really wanted to demonstrate your point you would show me some data. The data would demonstrate that over the millions and millions of users on a number of cloud platforms that their rates of data loss are significantly higher than your "home spun" storage. Then you would take out the outliers and show an honest distribution on the most stable vendors(since I'd expect the majority of data loss over all vendors to have some amount of locality within a specific vendor). The result of this will be the rate of data loss on the most reliable cloud platforms. You can then compare this against your own success rates.

If you have ever(even once) lost even a single byte of data(for any reason), I do believe you will find yourself hopelessly outmatched.

You seem to be missing the point.

People are not saying "don't use cloud storage at all"

They are saying "don't use cloud storage exclusively"

You might trust that your cloud providers will never be hacked, that your individual account on them will never be hacked, that they will never suffer a catastrophic failure, that they will never go out of business, that they will never be fully or intermittently down at the moment you need to retrieve some data, and so on and so forth, based on their claims and documentation, or that you won't cock up at some point and cause data loss in your account, but I prefer to have my own copy (or copies) as well as the ones that are "in the cloud". For truly essential data at least one of those copies is both offline and offsite.

For most values of "I have x hours and y dollars to safely store z gigabytes", a pure-cloud solution (possibly involving multiple independent cloud providers) has a lower chance of failure than one involving local storage.

But the fact remains that where ever you choose to put it "offline and offsite" the odds of it being lost are orders of magnitude greater then its persistent and redundant storage on a reputable cloud provider. Even if you put it on the most stable storage you can find and lock it in a underground safe. You can't guarantee its integrity a handful of years from now let alone centuries.

To put it in other words you are advocating storing your money in a mattress because you don't "trust the banks"

It is interesting that even today there are still people arguing against having back-ups because 'the cloud', you'd think that we ITers learn from our mistakes but for some this has to be personal experience before the lessons are learned. Good luck if and when it happens to you, please re-read your comments here at that time. There isn't an IT person that I know that has not been saved by a back-up at some point in their career, the fact that you are lucky so far is not a reason to think you are exempt.

And no, nobody is advocating storing your money in a mattress because you 'don't trust the banks', the point is that you can keep a copy of your critical data for very little money to safeguard against an eventuality that seems to hit the IT world with alarming regularity, even if they use 'the cloud'. Fuck-ups, hacks, disgruntled employees and failures all happen, every day.

The failure probabilities are relative. And everyone here is equivocating. As if the likelihood of failure is evenly dispersed. You indicate that storing customer data in the cloud is "playing fast and loose" but I'd argue the opposite. Not having a cloud backup is what is "fast and loose"

Imagine you are an independent bank. You need to move your customers deposits. Do you load sacks of cash into your corporate minivan or hire an armored car service? Well lets look closer. With the latter you are giving up control, right? You have no control over the quality measures an armored car service might take. Yet somehow not contracting them seems like foolishness. The reason is obvious. Its because you know in this case that transporting money isn't your expertise. Its not something you can focus adequate time and resources on perfecting. You also can't spread the risk of failure across a lot of customers, absorb that failure, and make your service better for the next go. The exact same logic applies to long term storage of data. If that isn't your only function its extremely hard to get it right.

If you bank fails, you will be made whole with money from the FDIC. Money is fungible. Any money will do.

Data is not similarly fungible. There's no IT FDIC to replace your lost data with other data that's identical.

When was the last time the FDIC failed versus the last time an online storage vendor folded?

Personally I think the risk that AWS fails is remote, but if I were to store a bunch of data with them I'd most definitely make sure that I would not be dependent on them. It would be a convenience at best, but never a dependency.

> You indicate that storing customer data in the cloud is "playing fast and loose" but I'd argue the opposite. Not having a cloud backup is what is "fast and loose"

Basic reading comprehension failure, that is not what GP is arguing.

He's arguing that if your live data lives in the cloud your backup copy should not be in the cloud and vice versa.

Insured by who? Not governments. Governments collapse all the time. The only safe place to keep it is in your own custom bank at home that you built yourself.

Money and data are not directly compatible here, as one "bit" of money is the same as any other in most respects, but I do always carry a minimum amount of cash in case my cards stop working or are lost/stolen, have a pot of "emergency cash" at home for similar reasons, and recommend others do the same. Most of my money is in the bank so I'm not protecting against massive institutional failure here, but I am protecting myself against a variety of possible temporary inconveniences and possible mistakes on my part.

I'd rather have two backups of which one is more likely to fail then the other than just one, or three rather than two, and mixing types of backups means not all of them are subject to exactly the same failure modes (my local backups, online or off, are unaffected by connectivity issues for instance). For data that is important, a little paranoia is healthy IMO.

In this case, money can't be compared to digital data. You can make multiple copies of digital data on our own but not of your money tucked away into a mattress, that would be illegal.

I also not advocating against the cloud, just that a single copy in S3 is not a backup solution.

There is no single perfect solution, so like security you layer your disaster recovery.

This is more or less an exact copy of how I would advise companies to set this up.