Comment by itake
6 years ago
> Easily recover backups of previous versions of your website's files, thanks to our automatic Snapshots system. It's free!
https://docs.gandi.net/en/simple_hosting/common_operations/s...
They are supposed to be providing backups.
I believe nobody should count on backups provided by the product that stores your data.
There are different kinds of backups here:
* the ones that are part of the offer, where the provider gives you a convenient way to recover from your mistakes, this is a feature they provide when their services are operational (in this case, the snapshots feature).
* the ones they put in place to mitigate incidents and maintain their SLOs. If you accidentally delete a file, you don't have access to them, they are useless to you. These backups are a mean to reach their service level objectives. Nobody can offer you 100% guarantee that they won't lose your data in an SLO. If someones promises you this, just... don't believe it.
(edit: formatting, typo, mention snapshots in case 1)
Key question, is it guaranteed in your contract?
Also:
> Snapshots do not make a backup of your databases. If you would like to perform a backup of your databases, we recommend you perform an export, or launch a dump script via crontab.
For those plan prices if I was running anything mission critical there then I'd be making darned sure I was squirting copies of my site's dynamic data to somewhere else on a regular basis (and you should also be able to re-deploy your code from local). Even if there was a guarantee, I'd still have a backstop in place. Never underestimate the chance of a good cockup.
The thing is, backup can mean different things. Those free/cheap "backup" snapshot things are obviously the equivalent of vim backup files. It's useful if you screw up and want to revert two hours later.
You have to be foolish to assume you get proper, actual backups for the price of a Coca-Cola can.