Comment by bscphil
6 years ago
Everything you say here is true, but at the same time it's just a fact that Gandi lost a lot of customers' data, and AWS, GCP, and Azure have never (as far as I know) lost a significant amount of it at once. You can talk about theoretical responsibility for data, and it's true, you are responsible for having backups of your data, no matter how many "9s" the service has, but the basic fact is that some services have been consistently good at not losing customer data, and others haven't. Even though I'm going to back up my data no matter where it is, I'd still rather use the service that's got a better track record with it.
I haven't ever even lost a file on Google Drive, which as far as I know provides no reliability guarantees at all.
Back in the early days GMail lost customer data due to storage corruption. It has happened.
The rarity is immaterial, the responsibility for data protection lies with you, not them.
> The rarity is immaterial
Of course it's material. If a provider has a 0.001% chance of losing some of my data in a year, I'm an idiot for not having backups. If a provider has a 10% chance of losing some of my data in a year, I'm an idiot for not having backups and for using that provider.
GMail is (usually) not an enterprise product and not a paid service, and provides no reliability guarantees. And yet it seems to be pretty damn good in practice.
Well to be fair Gmail was still in Beta ;)
I believe since then they had similar events but were always able to restore from tape. So GMail definitely has proper backups, even for free accounts (maybe not tape anymore, not sure).