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Backups on the same provider don't count

General Discussion by kat_fold 14 replies 3.3K views
kat_fold

Moderator OP

Moderator

#1

Hey folks

Hot take that's been cooking: backups on the same provider don't actually count as backups. If Contabo goes under, or OVHcloud has a catastrophic SAN failure, or someone at Vultr fat-fingers the storage network, your "backups" die with your production.

Snapshots are nice for quick rollback. They're not disaster recovery. Offsite means different provider, different geography, different failure domain. Ideally different billing entity so a payment snafu doesn't nuke both.

Fight me, or tell me I'm wrong with examples 🙂

~be kind or be gone~
prague1983

Member

btw I use Arch

#2

Agreed. Snapshots are just fast rollback. Not survival. The same flood takes both...

oops: 0000 [#1] SMP
cleardmitri

Moderator

Moderator

#3

Locked. Take it to DMs.

Not really. But you're both right. Same-provider backups are convenience theater. Real 3-2-1 needs air gap. Anything less is gambling.

No logs, no proof. I have logs.
zoekyo

Member

Less Is More

#4

I keep rsync to a box at my brother's house Different ISP, different power grid, different weather. He forgets it exists. I forget it exists. That's the point.

rm -rf / --no-preserve-root ☯
walt22

Member

Austin

#5

You know what gets me is people who say "but my host has RAID and redundant power" like that's somehow relevant to backups (it's not, that's availability, not recoverability) and then they have their "backups" on the same SAN or worse the same account and I've been doing this since 2009 and I saw Hetzner go down in 2019 (or was it 2020, time blurs) and people lost everything because their "offsite" was just a different node in the same datacenter and the fire suppression system (you know the one, the one that doesn't work when the electrical room floods) took out both and I had a friend who ran a Time4VPS out of Vilnius and he kept tapes in a bank vault and everyone laughed until the closet had a water main break and he was the only one who could restore and the laughing stopped pretty quick and that's why I don't trust any single provider for anything that matters and I h

ZH

Member

#6

I see this problem many time. Customer make a server up with backup in same place, then datacenter have big problem. I help one person from OVHcloud, they lose everything. Very sad. Now I always say: second provider, cheap VPS, rsync, done. Regards 😊

wendy

Member

#7

I also ship Veeam copies to a cheap Linux box at InterServer. Belt and suspenders. The provider snapshots are for speed. The offsite is for survival.

Have you tried restarting it?
prague1983

Member

btw I use Arch

#8

Same-provider backups are just spicy snapshots, change my mind

oops: 0000 [#1] SMP
minh1987

Member

#9

Different billing entity is overkill, no?

phở at 3AM, deploy at 4
walt22

Member

Austin

#10
minh1987 said:
Different billing entity is overkill, no?

Not if you've ever had a card expire on a holiday weekend and your provider suspends the whole account including "separate" backup storage because it's all under one billing profile. Seen it. 2017, different company, same lesson.

The billing entity thing isn't about paranoia. It's about correlation of failure. Payment problems, legal holds, account compromises -- they don't care that you labeled one server "production" and one "backup."

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