How many horror stories need to reach the front page of HN before people stop believing this? Getting locked out of your cloud provider is a very common failure mode, with catastrophic effects if you haven't planned for it. To my mind, it should be the first scenario in your disaster recovery plan.

Dumping everything to B2 is trivially easy, trivially cheap and gives you substantial protection against total data loss. It also gives you a workable plan for scenarios that might cause a major outage like "we got cut off because of a billing snafu" or "the CTO lost his YubiKey".

Sounds like the opposite of the survivor bias. I don't believe it's any sort of common (though it does happen), even less that "it should be the first scenario in your disaster recovery plan"

Every week there's another article on HN about a tiny business being squished in the gears of a giant, automated platform. In some cases like app stores this is unavoidable, but there are plenty of hosting providers to choose from. People need to learn that this is something that can happen to you in today's world, and take reasonable steps to prepare for it.

You can't dot every I, cross every t and also build a compelling product as a 2 person shop.

I could not disagree more. There's a right way and a wrong way to do this, it's trivial to do it right, and the risks of doing it wrong are enormous.

Then it's unrealistic to trust them with your business.

We don't know the structure of their DB and whether failover is important or not, so we don't know if the DB can be reliably pulled as a flat file backup and still have consistent data.

We also don't know how big the dataset is or how often it changes. Sometimes "backup over your home cable connection" just isn't practical.

Cron jobs can (and do) silently fail in all kinds of annoying and idiotic ways.

And as most of us are all too painfully aware, sometimes you make less-than-ideal decisions when faced with a long pipeline of customer bug reports and feature requests, vs. addressing the potential situation that could sink you but has like a 1 in 10,000 chance of happening any given day.

But yes, granted that as a quick stop-gap solution it's better than nothing.

I'm going to take a stab at small and infrequently.

Every 2-3 months we had to execute a python script that takes 1s on all our data (500k rows), to make it faster we execute it in parallel on multiple droplets ~10 that we set up only for this pipeline and shut down once it’s done.

Even if they lost some data, even if the backup silently failed and hadn't been running for two months, it's the difference between a large inconvenience and literally your whole business disappearing.

They had backups, but being arbitrarily cut-off from their hosting provider wasn't part of their threat model.

Isn't a big part of cloud marketing the idea that they're so good at redundancy, etc. that you don't need to attempt that stuff on your own? The idea that you have to spread your infrastructure across multiple cloud hosting providers, while smart, removes a lot of the appeal of using them at all. In any case, it's also probably too much infrastructure cost for a 2-man company.

keeping your production and your backups in the same cloud provider is the equivalent of keeping your backup tapes right next to the computer they're backing up. you're exposing them both to strongly correlated risks. you've just changed those risks from "fire, water, theft" to "provider, incompetence, security breach"

> So what is the purpose of the massive level of redundancy that you are already paying for when you store a file on S3?

You're paying to try and ensure you don't need to restore from backups. Our data lives in an RDS cluster (where we pay for read replicas to try and make sure we don't need to restore from backups) and in S3 (where we pay for durable storage to try and make sure we don't need to restore from backups), but none of that is a backup!

If you're not on the AWS cloud S3 is a decent place to store your backups of course, but storing your backups on S3 when you're already on AWS is, at best, negligent, while treating the durability of S3 as a form of backups is simply absurd.

> I don’t think it’s terribly common for even medium sized companies to have a multi tier1 cloud backup strategy.

The company I work for is on the AWS cloud, so we store our backups on B2 instead. It's no more work than storing them on S3, and it means we still have our data in the event that we, for whatever reason, lose access to the data we have in S3. Who the hell doesn't have offsite backups?

This is not remotely the same thing. A RAID offers no protection against logical corruption from an erroneous script or even something as simple as running a truncate on the wrong table. Having a backup of your database in a different storage medium on the same cloud provider protects from vastly more failure modes.

> Who the hell doesn't have offsite backups?

No one. But S3 is already storing your data in three different data centers even if you have a single bucket in one region, and you also have SQL log replication to another region. Multi-region is as easy as enabling replication but that is only available within a single cloud provider (I can't replicate RDS to Google Cloud SQL, only to another RDS region). I would guess that a lot of people use that rather than using a different cloud provider.

That sounds like...the same argument?

A RAID array stores your data on multiple physical drives in the machine, but offers no protection against logical corruption (where you store the same bad data on every drive), destruction of the machine, or loss of access to the machine.

S3 stores your data in multiple physical data centres in the region, but offers no protection against logical corruption, downtime of the entire region, or loss of access to the cloud.

You can't count replicas as providing durability against any threat that will apply equally to all the replicas.

...

> > "fire, water, theft"

i'm sure you could add a few more things to the list.

> I don’t think it’s terribly common for even medium sized companies to have a multi tier1 cloud backup strategy.

not terribly common to understand risk.

Let's be fair: The threat model here is "lose access to our data".

This can happen in a number of ways, lost (or worse, leaked) password to the cloud provider, provider goes bankrupt, developer gets hacked, and a thousand other things.

Even if you trust your provider to have good uptime, there's really no excuse for not having any backups. Especially not if you're doing business with Fortune 500's.