Today a Cloud provider announced they lost data that was advertised as backed up.
As clients move more data and workload to the cloud, it becomes important to understand how your data is protected, the rules of data protection are not different just because the data sits somewhere in someone else’s data center.
A good backup follows a “3 2 1” rule which is:
1. Have at least three copies of your data.
2. Store the copies on two different media.
3. Keep one backup copy offsite.
To learn more about the various data protection dangers, see our post on keeping engineering data safe.
Don’t Store Backups next to the Data.
One cloud provider advertises a backup service, but the backups are documented as being stored in the same data center as your data. If the data center burns down, you can’t recover your data.
RAID is not a backup.
It is worth reminder that RAID array of disks is also not a backup. HPE recently announced a disk flaw on some SSD disk models causing those disks to completely fail at exactly 3 years, 270 days and 8 hours. This means all disks in the RAID will fail at the same time resulting in total data loss. RAID is not a backup.
TotalCAE StorageCamel
If subscribed to our StorageCamel service, TotalCAE will protect your engineering data via the “3 2 1” strategy. On the cloud, we work with IaaS native vendor services to implement the “3 2 1” strategy.
For example, for TotalCAE on AWS we utilize AWS Backup along with some additional protection mechanism to allow us to recover from instance corruption, EBS corruption, filesystem corruption, AZ loss, region loss, and other threats to client data.