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Google Cloud accidentally deletes a financial institution account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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A week of downtime and all the servers were recovered only because the customer had a proper disaster recovery protocol and held backups somewhere else, otherwise Google deleted the backups too

Google cloud ceo says "it won't happen anymore", it's insane that there's the possibility of "instant delete everything"

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[–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

They had backups at multiple locations, and lost data at multiple (Google Cloud) locations because of the account deletion.

They restored from backups stored at another provider. It may have been more devastating if they relied exclusively on google for backups. So having an "offsite backup" isn't enough in some cases, that offsite location need to be at a different provider.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It may have been more devastating if they relied exclusively on google for backups.

    Which is why having any data, despite the number of backups, on a cloud provider shouldn't be seen as off-site.

    Only when it is truly outside their ecosphere and cannot be touched by them should it be viewed as such.

    If that company didn't have such resilience built into their backup plan, they would be toast with a derisory amount of compensation from Google.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Having a backup at a cloud provider is fine, as long as there is at least one other backup that isn't with this provider.

    Cloud provider seems to do a good job protecting against hardware failure, but can do poorly with arbitrary account bans, and sometimes have mishaps due to configuration problems.

    Whereas a DIY backup solution is often more subject to hardware problems (disk failure, fire, flooding, theft, ...), but there's no risk of account problem.

    A mix is fine to protect against different kind of issues.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    as long as there is at least one other backup that isn't with this provider.

    Which is exactly what I was saying.

    Any services used with a cloud provider should be treated as 1 entity, no matter how many geo-locations they claim your data is backed up to because they are a single point from which all those can be deleted.

    When I was last involved in a companies backups, we had a fire safe in the basement, we had an off-site location with another fire safe & third copies would go off to another company that provided a backup storage solution so for all backups to be deleted, someone had to go right out of their way to do so. Not just a simple deletion of our account & all backups are wiped.

    That company had the foresight to do something similar & it's saved them. [edited - was on the tube when I wrote this and didnt see the autocorrect had put 'comment', not 'company']

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