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.
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"