I guess a lot of people are fine with the risk.

Everybody uses it, so if, like, Gmail loses all the emails, we are then in such a state that the consequences will be more bearable and socially normal.

Most people are fine with accepting that whatever future thing will happen to most people will also happen to them. Because then the consequences will also be normal.

If the apocalypse comes, it comes for almost all of us and that's consolation enough.

This sounds like the good old 1970-80s "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" argument.

Still haven't heard of anyone being fired for buying IBM. Have you?

Yeah but for the people making that argument, it was a good one!

The way I see it, backups are a strategy to reduce risk of ruin.

For me, backing up to the Cloud is fine, because I find the risk of my home being broken into and everything stolen AND the cloud goes down AND the cloud services are completely unrecoverable is a small enough risk to tolerate.

I don't think it's possible to have permanently indestructible files in existence over a given time period.

Different failure mode. If the cloud goes down, many more people are affected. If your self-hosted thing goes down, only you are affected. If everybody self-hosted, would the overall downtime be lower? Even if it were, would it be worth the effort of self-hosting?

For baby pictures yes, for everything else, no

Most of the things I backed up for myself are either gone forever or irretrievably lost.

Most of the things I backed up with google remain largely accessible, except for an occasion like this.

It's rare that any services I operate solo come back this quickly after there is a downing issue.

I have the opposite experience, at least with regard to your first two paragraphs. Most of the things that I have backed up on other people's computers over the past 3-4 decades are irretrievably lost. But most of the things that I have taken care to make backups of on personal equipment over the years, are still with me.

Cloud storage is still useful of course, but I prefer to view it as a cache rather than as a dependable backup.

Of course it's viable as a backup. Availability != realibility. My data is still reliably saved in the cloud even if there is an outage for a few hours. The key point is backup, e.g. Dropbox. When you use Google Docs, it becomes a single source of truth and a SPOF.

This depends on the circumstances. If your personal photos are unaccessible then maybe it doesn't matter, but if it's your documentation for a mission critical bit of infrastructure then a few hours could be very significant. Somebody in that situation probably wouldn't agree with your assertion that "availability != reliability". If I can't access it when I need it then I wouldn't consider it reliable.

Whatever data I have backed up in the cloud is synced across multiple devices that I use. Even if the cloud disappeared altogether, I still have it. The cloud allows me to keep an up to date copy across various devices.

Both Google Drive/Photos and OneDrive have an option to only keep recently used files on your local device, and even periodically suggest they automatically remove local copies of unused files to "free up space".

I highly suggest everyone disable this setting on their own, but also on their (perhaps less technical) friends' and relatives' devices. Otherwise, if anything happens to your account or - less likely - the storage provider or their hardware, your data could very well be gone forever. I can't believe anyone would want that.

You don't need 'the cloud' to do that. Look into Syncthing. It does depend on an outside "discovery server" by default to enable syncing outside of your LAN, but you can run your own.

https://syncthing.net/

What's annoying is that synchronisation does't work for google slides or google docs. They are just synchronized as links to the webpage on my computer.

If you use Insync you have the option of converting to DOCX or ODT. Insync has other issues though, my "sourcetreeconfig" is being downloaded as "sourcetreeconfig.xml".

Not 100% on that, but I think you can save these documents on Google Drive, and then they're treated (and synced) just like any other files.

>So, anybody still feel like arguing that 'the cloud' is a viable back-up? Or is that a sore point right now? Just for a moment imagine: what if it never comes back again?

Much less chance of that happening than my local backups getting borked...

But much higher than the chances of both of them getting borked.

Of course cloud is a viable back up, similarly to physical drives.

Both have vastly different failure modes and typical backup should use both of them.

This way if all my backups are gone I likely have way more important issues that loss of files.

(and yes, my backups are encrypted)

Just a few moments ago, I wrote in my company's group chat this is the time when we buy NAS. We have a lot of documents not accessible right now in Google Drive.

Clever.

What worries me the most is email. I basically don't use any other Google services other than Gmail and YouTube, but for email I really don't know of an alternative.

Sure you can argue "move to Fastmail/Protonmail/Hey/whatever", but those can also go down on you just like Google is down now. And self hosting email is apparently not a thing due to complexity and having to forever fight with being marked as spam (ndr.: not my personal experience, I never tried self hosting, just relying what I read here on HN when the topic comes up).

So, yeah, what do we do about email? I feel like we should have a solution to this by now, but somehow we don't.

I've been happy with using Hosted Exchange on Microsoft. I own the domain so ultimately I can point the DNS to some other provider. Outlook stores the mails locally so I have a backup. I think the most important thing about E-Mail is to receive future E-Mails and not look at historical ones. In the end you can always ask the receipent to send you a copy of the email conversation - if you dont own the domain it get much harder to convince you actually own the email.

For < $100/year, Microsoft will sell you hosted Exchange (and you can use it with up to 900 domains [0]), 1 TB of storage, 2 installable copies of Office, and Office 365 on-line.

That's _much_ better than trying to host my own email server.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptio...

The point is that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. All services go down. If you're worried about someone else handling it when it goes down then host your own [1], otherwise you can use something different for each thing you need. Don't rely on Google for everything.

1- https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#ema...

Yes, I know what's the point. But how do you avoid putting all your eggs in one basket? You can't host your email on more than one "provider" (including self host), and the vast majority of important services that you link your email to (bank, digital identity, taxes and other government services) does not allow you to have more than one linked to it; which means, that one goes down, you don't have one. Sure, I can give my accountant and my lawyer a second email address, hosted on a different provider, but that poses two problems: 1. how are they gonna know when one is working and one isn't? It's not like you get a notification if your email didn't reach most of the time, it just drops; 2. if you always send all emails to both addresses, now two providers have my data instead of one (of course excluding if one is self hosted). And you also need to always keep in mind that for all things important: one is none, two is one; so you should really have 3 addresses on 3 different providers according to that, which brings us back to the problems above. (and I'm not even mentioning the confusion that it would generate if you don't manage to get the same name with every provider "Wait, was it [email protected], or was it [email protected]? Or was that fastmail?")

As I said (literally in the second sentence), I don't rely on Google for everything, as you mention. I don't actually rely on Google for anything other than gmail, and of that I am also unhappy. The point I was trying to make is that there aren't really alternatives, and I was hoping someone might come out with a suggestion about how to overcome that problem.

You shouldn't use [email protected] as your main email, you should have your own domain. So `[email protected]` will always be yours no matter if you self host or use 3rd party. I currently use Fastmail and i've been very happy with them. If they fail or turn evil, I'll switch to something else maintaining the same address. Emails themselves should be downloaded/backed-up regularly, kind of like important documents you'd have on your disk.

> You can't host your email on more than one "provider"

You can do split delivery and have your email be delivered to two different destinations. It's less common than it used to be but it's trivial.

I'm running my own mail server, and I think anyone who has some experience with Linux should be able to do the same in a day or two. Once it's set up it just works.

You can still use Gmail and fall back to connecting directly to your server if Gmail is down.

Some mails might be flagged as spam if the IP/domain has no reputation, but that quickly passes, at least that's my experience.

I specifically use Gsuite so that I don't have to deal with managing a spam filter or dealing with IP reputation issues. I'd be willing to self-host almost anything else.

I guess something highly resilient would be - say - a mailserver on a rented VM replicating to two cloud providers via a service mesh.

Nice and simple! :D

A lot of domain registrars will host/relay mail for you if you don't want to think about it. Otherwise it's not too hard to host yourself. The sucky part is when it breaks because you can't really just put off fixing it.

I've been using mailu.io to host my own email server. Makes it real easy to manage yourself.

I haven't had any issues with new domains being marked as spam, but I always make sure the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are set up.

I’ve heard multiple founders argue that it’s safe to have downtime because of a cloud outage, because you’re not likely to be the highest importance service that your customers use that also had downtime.

Well yeah; I don't trust myself enough to own & operate my own servers, and I cannot give myself any uptime guarantees - let alone at the scale that a cloud provider can offer me.

"The Cloud" is vague, and if you don't specify what it means then the answer to your question can only be "it depends".

If the question is "anybody still feel like arguing that 'a single provider' is a viable back-up" then it's yes for most cases. A better strategy is of course to use multiple providers. The chances that it never comes back again is much lower.

People would probably argue a “multi cloud” solution. Have your infrastructure be “cloud agnostic” and this sort of problem would be avoided.

There was actually a project called “spinnaker” that was supposed to solve this problem.

Whether the cost of paying 2 or more cloud providers is worth it for most companies is up in the air.

"Multi-cloud" only works if you stick with the basics. Like disk storage, compute, and a well-supported database. Once you tie in into a cloud's specific offerings.....

It's getting convoluted now that cloud providers seem to realize there's demand for this

https://aws.amazon.com/hybrid https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-arc https://cloud.google.com/anthos

Full disclosure: I work for Azure. Don't work on Arc tho. Don't have experience being a customer for these products

I find the Anthos docs and talks so confusing. Half of them say Anthos is for hybrid between on-prem and GCP. The other half say it's for multicloud and hybrid.

Well, since a viable backup strategy requires at least 3 storage locations (eg the in-use primary, an on-site or off-site backup, and a secondary off-site backup) "the cloud" is fine as an off-site backup or secondary off-site backup.

Let's hope tailscale swoops in and creates a no-gimmicks, highly usable, private internet for everyone.

They seemed to have figured out the hard parts already.

You mean like using Google GSuite for SSO? In the context of this authentication-related outage, it's a funny suggestion.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1013/sso-providers

> Of course it will, - at least, it better - but what if it doesn't?

Same question for non-cloud.

Back to normal. I can live without email for an hour...