> I felt the person I replied to implied that 100s of terabytes of data are too expensive to backup.
Well, you felt wrong. Of course you should back up those 100s of terabytes, in fact that it is that much information is an excellent reason on top of all the other ones to back it up, re-creating it is going to be next to impossible.
It's just that the companies I look at - not all, but definitely some - seem to be under the impression that the cloud (or their cloud provider) can be trusted. Which is wrong for many reasons, not just this article.
I forget where I first saw this quoted, but it's relevant here: "There is no 'cloud', only someone else's computer". That's part of why I store very little data online, compared to most people (or the data I actually have/want). Anything I'm not okay with someone else having on their computer is backed up and stored on hard physical media. No cloud provider can be trusted - the moment the government wants in, they'll get in; and the moment it's considered more profitable for the provider to quietly snoop in your stored data, rest assured that they will.
No problem, it's just that with 'This is one of the reasons I always implore people to have a backup of their data with another provider or at least under a different account.' that passage I thought I had the backup angle more than covered.
What bugs me about it is that there are some companies that give serious pushback because their cloud providers keep on hammering in to them how reliable their cloud is and that any back-up will surely be less reliable than their cloud solution and oh by the way we also have a backup feature that you can use.
They don't realize that even then they still have all their eggs in the one basket: their cloud account.
It's strange, but I completely missed the last part about backup from your comment. I have no idea how I missed it. Had I seen it would make my comment redundant and I would have never replied at all.
I only saw that part of the comment much much later.
Well, it definitely wasn't added in a later edit, or at least, not that I'm aware of, though I do have a tendency to write my comments out in bits submitted piece-by-piece. Even so, I wouldn't worry about it, I tend to miss whole blocks of text with alarming regularity while reading through stacks of pdfs and when comparing notes with colleagues we always wonder if we've been reading the same documents (they have the same problem...). Reading in parallel is our way of trying to ensure we don't miss anything and unfortunately it is not a luxury.
Often the effects are more subtle, reading what you think something said rather than what it actually said, or missing a negation or some sub-clause that materially alters the meaning of a sentence.
Even in proofreading we find stuff that is so dead obvious it is embarrassing. On the whole visual input for data is rather unreliable, even when reading stuff you wrote yourself, which I find the most surprising bit of all.
Studying this is interesting, and to some extent important to us due to the nature of our business, missing critical info supplied by a party we are looking at could cause real problems so we have tried to build a process to minimize the incidence of such faults, even so I'm 100% sure that with every job we will always miss something, and I live in perpetual fear of that something being something important.
Well, you felt wrong. Of course you should back up those 100s of terabytes, in fact that it is that much information is an excellent reason on top of all the other ones to back it up, re-creating it is going to be next to impossible.
It's just that the companies I look at - not all, but definitely some - seem to be under the impression that the cloud (or their cloud provider) can be trusted. Which is wrong for many reasons, not just this article.