So, 3-2-1 backup, with other cloud service π«€
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
237 points (98.4% liked)
Programming
21924 readers
710 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Before anyone says βyou put all your eggs in one basket,β let me be clear: I didnβt. I put them in one provider, with what should have been bulletproof redundancy
This shouldn't happen and the OOP clearly knows what he was doing but putting everything in a single provider with multiple services clearly is not redundancy.
The author put it well:
What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.
Multi-region cloud computing is already difficult and expensive enough, multi-cloud is not only technically complex but financially and legally fraught with uncertainties. At that point you're giving up so much of the promise of cloud computing that you might as well rent rack space somewhere, install bare-metal infra, and pay someone to drive there to manually backup to tape every 3 months.
This level of technical purity is economically unfeasible for virtually everyone, that's the whole point of paying a vendor to deal with it for us. And you know who doesn't need to put up with the insane overhead of multi-cloud setups? That's right, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who will be getting paid for hosting everyone else's multi-cloud setups while they get to run their huge infra on their own cloud without fear. The last thing GAFAM competitors - especially OSS projects - need is even fewer economies of scale.
Stop with the victim-blaming, this blunder is squarely on AWS.
Yeah, but he was paying the provider for providing the redundancy on this level.
We shouldn't blame him on the technical level for what is a problem with the provider on the organizational level. If this had happened to a Fortune 500 company, Amazon would have had an army of lawyers descend on them.
Multi-cloud is a significant amount of effort to pull off.
Being on one cloud provider across multiple regions is often plenty of redundancy.
Being available across multiple cloud providers is really REALLY difficult
In terms of service availability, yes.
In terms of data backup, no.
Multi-cloud is difficult, that's true. But having backups outside the single cloud is easy.
That way if your cloud provider pulls the plug, you will have to reconfigure everything but at least your data stays intact.
To be able to recover from something like that you don't need multiple working cloud setups. You just need backups, so that in an event like OOP's, you spend a few weeks rebuilding the configurations instead of years rebuilding your projects.
Tha's what happens when you dance with the devil.
It's interesting that LLMs emotionally saved them, allowing them to bounce back from a destructive to a constructive mindset.
Reading another post of theirs, they seem to really love AI. Albeit in that post, it feels to me like they took AI responses too literally, with too much meaning (as if sentient, or ignoring potential training bias, etc).
Platform decay strikes again.
Bezos and the shareholders weren't happy with AWS already being one of the single most profitable products in human history, because capitalism demands unending infinite year-on-year growth.
Whenever you hear them cry that capitalism breeds innovation, the kinds of innovation they're talking about are this shitty AI profit-maximising algorithm that created OOP's problem. This isn't a crazy conspiracy theory either; I've consulted in the software dev teams of dozens of major multinationals and the projects were always, without exception, some variant on "how can we replace people" or "how can we reduce costs by doing something slightly worse".
I've consulted in the software dev teams of dozens of major multinationals and the projects were always, without exception, some variant on "how can we replace people" or "how can we reduce costs by doing something slightly worse".
Always might be an overstatement, but this has been true over the past couple years for myself and the people I know at these companies. Especially right now - upper management seems to be deluded into thinking that LLMs can do anything, or more likely, they're just trying to sell hype like everyone else just to raise the stock price.
Just stop thinking your shit is safe in the "cloud" people. It isn't. And trusting in a single company to have your back, or even care about you is naive at best.
Why I have everything backed up on a hard drive of my own. Wish could build my own server, but don't have the funds at this time. But pretty close just starting my own internet.
You can run a basic server with an old laptop, desktop, mini-pc, anything. Everyone starts somewhere. If you eventually need 'more' or 'better', you can figure things out then. Getting started with a used office PC for 40$ off eBay (or anything old you already have) is fine. Just get started.
My NAS is a 10+ year old Dell XPS that I just shoved new drives into. I need to get a rack mounted low power server to replace it but it works fine for now.
I have an old Toshiba laptop that put Linux on, I wouldn't mind turning into a server. I want to build a new gaming rig, then I can take my current rig and turn it into a big server. Definitely like to just wire me and my two sons rigs into our own private network.
Just try it with the old laptop. I personally found dietpi the incredibly easy entry. Super bare bones Linux actually meant for raspberry pi and such, but you can run it on any old laptop. Using your all gaming rig might be a high energy usage if you're just gonna run barely more than a NAS. If you do it with the laptop, take out the battery or put a timer on charger outlet, permanently connected and charging with a system that isn't actively managing the battery and charging could get you a spicy pillow quickly.
I'm guessing they don't live with you? And you need to setup a VPN? If so you can do that with a pretty low powered machine. Even a rPi is good enough.
That's perfect! I ran my server on an old HP laptop for 2 years before I put together a desktop SFF server with 2nd hand gaming PC parts.
Just throw Debian or opensuse MicroOS on it and take off!
Even for a step in between the two if you need more storage, I used one of these docking stations that you can get for cheap to add more storage.
some home nas can also be budget friendly... or some vps, where you can start small and scale up on-the-fly when you need it.
The cloud is, and always has been, merely other peopleβs computers.
Their only legitimate use case is as disposable, transient, dumb nodes and synapses of a system you retain control and agency of.
It's truly amazing that Amazon is able to convince anyone that it's a good idea to store valuable business data on their computers
People are so eager to relinquish control of their business, even their life, for the tiniest bit of convenience.
I really need to start backups of my S3 bucket and my Hetzner Server to a local hard drive.
More reason that other countries developing smaller, regional cloud providers is a good thing. Part of the reason AWS thinks they can get away with this is that there are 2-3 other providers they compete with, and moving is onerous. If there were 200+ cloud providers, there would almost certainly be a standard set of tools and much better customer service.
JFC this poor dev.
Luckily many of my jobs or clients don't like AWS and have gone elsewhere. One of my projects is self-hosted (with an off-site backup).
I wish this person the best moving forward, I didn't recommend AWS before, but I'll definitely make sure to push against it now.
This stuff terrifies me. I'm de-googling as fast as I can and reviewing all my local backups plus add encryption to what stays in the cloud.
Yeah thats what happens when you host your shit on some corporate "cloud", but will they learn from this and move to self hosting, or will they just find some smaller provider who can do the same rug pull again.
Do you mean self-host on your own hardware and infrastructure? At home? Otherwise you'd still be dependent on the server or infrastructure providers.
Do you mean self-host on your own hardware and infrastructure? At home?
Ideally yes, or alternatively if you do need to depend on other people's infrastructure, choose companies that aren't massive multi-billion dollar operations that have zero concerns about you or keeping your business.
Well teach me the way to self host on the cheap?
Id be happy to, what kind of services are you wanting to run and whats your home internet setup?
I can message here on lemmy but it might be easier if you want to contact me directly through chat, my contact info can be found here: https://gravitywell.xyz/#contact
Oh nothing special just want to store my music, videos, and games, along with documents and have access to them from anywhere. I have gig a blast with Cox, and I also wouldn't mind hosting my own websites. Instead of paying for hosting to Siteground.com that can't even allow me to use Javascript in my code without costing hundreds of dollars a month.
Hosting A basic website (with javascript) is a great place to start.
I mainly use docker for everything and you can get a simple http server docker point it at a folder containing your html files and now you have your own selfhosted website.
Use something like duckdns.org for a domain and dyndns to update the ip address to point to your home ip and have your router forward the http port, now your website can be accessed from outside the home network too.
Once you get a basic website working, its easy to keep going and try adding new services. I use dockge to manage all my docker services now but when i first got started i found dockstarter to be very easy to use, kind of like training wheels for docker until you feel comfortable enough to edit compose files directly.
I currently pay $8/month for a basic VPS which i use because i have a lot of public services but if you are just managing your own stuff or another user or 2 you dont even need that really.
For document storage id go with Nextcloud. If you want to also have dedicated music streaming i really like mStream for its simplicty but theres also a number of other services that support the subsonic protocol which has a lot of good clients to choose from for playback.
Thanks I try that out.
If my years have taught me anything, it's the latter.
The legal battle over arbitrary exclusion is a difficult fight by innocent victims.
Not having backups is a confession by morons with nobody to blame but themselves.
These two things can coincide.
This is not the story of a person with no backups. It's the story of a person with partial backups.
Be careful before you blame the victim, and if you're going to do so anyway, at least be accurate about it.
Eh, the author definitely has more responsibility than he makes out. He's fully aware that it wasn't suitable as a backup for all of his stuff (like the book he was writing and all the tutorials), but acts like that shouldn't matter because he wanted to use it that way to make his desktop workflow better.