https://www.jitbit.com/news/2273-youre-backing-up-for-the-wrong-disaster/

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You're backing up for the wrong disaster

Updated Mar 26 2022 :: by Alex Yumashev

Everyone should be doing backups, right? Especially if you run a SaaS
business and store customers' data.

Coming up with a backup strategy can be complicated. Not only it can
be terabytes of data. It can also be highly heterogeneous - meaning
it's not just files and folders, but also databases, transaction
logs, key-value stores, full-text search indexes, cloud-storage...

But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest mistake I've seen
people make is - protecting themselves from the wrong disaster.

Ask yourself: What is that "data loss" you're protecting yourself
from?

When someone says "data loss" engineers usually picture this:

[]

Or this

[]

Or, at least, this:

[]

 

While in real life it's usually this:

 

[]

We subconsciously focus on "movie-like" threats, like some evil
hacker bringing down a server from his dark basement. Or hijacking
and then deleting important data by using some secret NSA/CIA
backdoor in the operating system. Or an earthquake destroying your
datacenter.

While in real life it's probably something much more prosaic:
untested code, a tired sysadmin, a user deleting their own files, a
developer commiting code to the wrong branch, an angry ex-employee
deleting stuff after being let go...

We've been running a SaaS helpdesk app for almost 10 years and we had
our share of data losses. While no data was actually lost forever (we
managed to recover every time), our humble stats goes like this:

  * 3.3% - hardware failures (including hard drive damage)
  * 1.6% - power failures (causing, well, same hardware failures from
    above)
  * 6% - software failures, bugs and data corruption
  * 50% - accidental deletion by a user
  * 33% - accidental deletion by our own engineers

Those #4 and #5 are the ones you should prepare yourself for. These
are going to be your biggest threat. Not a hurricane, not an
earthquake, not a hardware failure and not a hacker attack. And one
of the most popular requests from customers is going to be "help, I
just deleted something". Meaning, most of the time your "restore"
procedure is not actually restoring lost data, but rolling it back to
a previous state.

Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't protect yourself from viruses,
attacks, shouldn't patch your servers or encrypt the data. I'm just
saying your backup/restore procedure should be designed accordingly.
Your data will probably be deleted by legit users in a legit
workflow, and most backup/restore strategies are not ready for this.

Like, here's a phrase I've heard countless times:

    "I don't need to backup Amazon S3 because Amazon S3 is like
    99.99999-something durable"

Yeah, right. And because your users never delete anything by
accident. And because your developers make zero mistakes when writing
code.


'You're backing up for the wrong disaster' was written by Alex
Yumashev
Alex Yumashev
Alex has founded Jitbit in 2005 and is a software engineer passionate
about customer support.


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