Backup providers

Posted Jul 29, 2025 14:21 UTC (Tue) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248)
In reply to: Backup providers by Heretic_Blacksheep
Parent article: LWN is back

I totally agree with you wrt. backup responsibilities. The thing is that in the OVH case not only were bare-bones VMs affected, even customers who did pay for backups were affected as OVH had located the backup targets in the same data centers as the machines that were backed up, and therefore the backups burned down, too. I even think they lied to customers about where backups were stored, but don't quote me on that.

That part's definitely on OVH.

Backup providers

Posted Jul 29, 2025 17:54 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Typically cloud providers don't provide backups for servers. In fact, they explicitly tell you that you can lose the data if the DC is destroyed.

It's still your responsibility to mirror the data into another region (datacenter) and/or use storage that is guaranteed to have durability guarantees (like S3 in AWS).

Backup providers

Posted Jul 29, 2025 19:27 UTC (Tue) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Again, I totally agree. What I was talking about, though, is that there were customers that _did pay_ for the optional backup addon/option, and those backups were lost, too, due to the backup servers being located in the same DC that burned down.

You can argue that only having one backup location is not enough, and I also agree, but still — the setup chosen by OVH is downright incompetent.