Comment by flippingheck
6 hours ago
> There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will.
This is an empirical claim, but is it grounded in reality?
99% of people don't backup, and that's probably the right choice because the risk is low, they can't meaningfully improve their restoration rate themselves and they don't care enough about their data to classify its loss as catastrophic.
When a person hears someone talk about the importance of backups, but also haven't heard friends/family suffer this date, they will rightfully ignore this warning.
Or do we all follow the best practices as it relates to backups, exercise, sleep, nutrition, accounting, house maintenance, ... Etc.
I do not. Backups aren't near the top of that list.
This stuff just isn't very important to most people and that's okay.
Let's say SSDs have an annualized failure rate of 1%. (The real figures are from 0.5% for more reliable ones, 1.5% for less reliable ones). The annualized failure rate for HDDs is a bit higher, but let's give it 1% anyway.
Over 40 years (even with changing disks, upgrading PCs, etc.), the chances of you ending up with your data intact is 0.99^40=0.67. May not seem too bad, but this is just a hardware failure of your main drive we're talking about. When you factor in all the other types of screwups that happen, the annualized failure rate will skyrocket.
So a more conservative version of this quote is that a 20-year old today is very likely to experience data loss over his lifetime.
Thankfully with cloud being ubiquitous at least photos are given one copy in the cloud, but IMO even that is risky. People have different appetites for risk, and that's OK. But over the last 20 years the all of our data has become pretty important. I don't know how many people could stomach the loss of important documents, photos, etc.
~30 years old here, and I can confirm I risked and suffered data loss multiple times. I remember when I still was at my parents house during university I had in mind to build a NAS to properly host the family's photo archive (main reason was bit rot protection, which we experienced, but I was planning for a proper backup as well). But I kept procrastinating. Then, I risked losing it due to a distraction. After spending one week to recover it, building a proper solution to host and backup it became top of my list.
It’s because they all use cloud services these days which the tech companies manage backups for them. The only risk is getting locked out or banned which is far less common than hard drive failures or malware back in the day.
It’s still vitally important if you are self hosting your data.
> 99% of people don't backup
This depends on your viewpoint. Using gmail for example is an implicit backup of your e-mails. Uploading your pictures to Facebook the same. The move from local, private compute and storage to the cloud solved this issue for many to a degree that it is now less important.
I think this is more a quote for engineers