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Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

status.gandi.net

61–70 of 389 posts

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#61
post #42
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replication is not a backup as was already mentioned. A great example of this is when the KDE project almost lost all of their Git repos because they were mirroring a corrupted copy of the data. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMzNTc

A backup is a replication of the live dataset, although, usually out of sync to be useful when the main dataset goes bad.

You might want to read the Wikipedia definition, because you're technically mistaken.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#62
post #10

> We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this situation has caused. This type of incident is extremely rare in the web hosting industry. Why are they speaking of the "industry" as a whole when they are to blame? It's even crazier they are not even explaining the source of the data loss and why the "replication systems" didn't help. IHMO they are trying to sweep this event under the carpet. They should inst…

Replication is explicitly designed to correct issues associated with bitrot and add redundancy.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#63
post #44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Gandi for domains & DNS too. I've never had any problems so far but I don't want any surprises... Where do you want to migrate? What is a better alternative?

Same here. Wondering what alternative there is. Heard good things about https://porkbun.com/

I wish porkbun allowed easier DNS record management. It's very cute, but I cant edit a bind style file, which means a lot of extra clicks.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#64
post #61
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A backup is a replication of the live dataset, although, usually out of sync to be useful when the main dataset goes bad.

You might want to read the Wikipedia definition, because you're technically mistaken. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup

I'm not, you can't do backup without replicating data, hence, if you do backup, you are doing replication.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#65

Dear customer, This mail is a follow-up to the previous email we sent (on January 8th, 2020) on this topic. As a reminder, yesterday, we experienced an incident on a storage unit at our LU-BI1 datacenter, located in Luxembourg. Despite the replication systems in place, and the combined efforts of our technical teams throughout the night, we were unable to reover the data that was lost on the impacted storage unit. We…

Is this a response from the company or are you putting it forth as an example response for how to handle this incident better? It’s unclear from your post.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#66
post #28

Oof, this Twitter thread looks particularly bad, especially the response from the official Gandi account. https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12151991477012316... While I appreciate that there are real people behind these companies that are probably having a really rough time right now, the criticism that Gandi are getting as a company is justified - and if Gandi are truly a "no bullshit" company they need to…

This is god damn unbelievable "Andrea, sorry about that and the incident. If we led you to believe that you had nothing to do on your side when warned multiple times to make your back ups, then we'll have to make it clearer, and stop assuming that it's an industry wide knowledge."

Big words for a company that's in trouble for not backing up data themselves.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#67
post #6

Gandi have something of a cult following, but in my only experience with them they literally lost my domain name during an inbound transfer. Their response was awful and rude and completely unprofessional. I never got my domain back. Based on that experience, this incident doesn’t surprise me at all.

what can you recommend as an alternative?

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#68
post #28

Oof, this Twitter thread looks particularly bad, especially the response from the official Gandi account. https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12151991477012316... While I appreciate that there are real people behind these companies that are probably having a really rough time right now, the criticism that Gandi are getting as a company is justified - and if Gandi are truly a "no bullshit" company they need to…

This is god damn unbelievable "Andrea, sorry about that and the incident. If we led you to believe that you had nothing to do on your side when warned multiple times to make your back ups, then we'll have to make it clearer, and stop assuming that it's an industry wide knowledge."

Seeing the thread I couldn't believe they are being serious. Feels like they are playing a tasteless prank. Such crass and careless attitude is downright repelling.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#69
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not the industry standard for web hosting. Never has been, never will be. Backups aren't free. Replication isn't free. DR isn't free. If a customer isn't paying a premium for them, they aren't getting them. Read the terms of service.

In this case, the customer did pay for it: https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12152083871699804... See full thread. Snapshots are marketed as backups.

So?

Intelligent people can argue all day about whether a snapshot should be considered a backup or not, but it won't change the fact that a snapshot doesn't provide any protection from a failure in the underlying storage and it's ridiculously foolish for the owner of data to solely rely on snapshots as their backup strategy.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they didn’t have any backups at all but rather relied on a active-active replication link to a secondary storage. Edit: who knows it may be related to the HPE issue. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/hp-warns-that...

What baffles me is that there seems to be no way for either the customer or a data-recovery company to flash a new firmware onto the drive after it has failed. Someone there wanted to spare the few millicents of copper trace for a JTAG port?!

Probably to prevent supply chain firmware changes for hacking, espionage, etc.
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