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Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

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Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#261
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is insane to me that anyone would point to china as a example of how the rest of the world should operate If you do clearly you place no value on what most people call Basic Human Rights. >> And I think it demonstrates that market based systems that are "free markets" can be quite effective, I am not sure what you are trying to say here, everyone knows Free markets result in the best economic outcomes, that was my…

> it is insane to me that anyone would point to china as a example of how the rest of the world should operate. If you do clearly you place no value on what most people call Basic Human Rights. I don't like the human rights abuses in China. But that doesn't mean they don't do anything well. Such an argument is silly. I could makes a similar claim about the US. How does the US do on the right to healthcare for example…

>>I could makes a similar claim about the US. How does the US do on the right to healthcare for example? Awfully.

Well first and foremost Healthcare is not a right. It is a Service that has to be provided based on limited resources

Rights are things like Free Speech, the Right to Self Defense, the right to not have your property stolen, etc

Aka Negative Rights

The right to be free from abuse

Things like "health care" are not Human Rights at all

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#262
post #222

I take nightly images of my computer's primary drive and replicate them offsite, with alerting if it fails and automated scheduled backup restore testing. It blows my mind to think that some random schmuck like me has better backup procedures than these multibillion dollar global corporations. Companies that don't invest in their IT end up paying for it tenfold down the track.

How fast is your internet connection? That sounds like a big lift for a full image every night.

100/40, the daily images are incrementals which average around 8GB, I take full images once a month

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#263
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is insane to me that anyone would point to china as a example of how the rest of the world should operate If you do clearly you place no value on what most people call Basic Human Rights. >> And I think it demonstrates that market based systems that are "free markets" can be quite effective, I am not sure what you are trying to say here, everyone knows Free markets result in the best economic outcomes, that was my…

> If you do clearly you place no value on what most people call Basic Human Rights. For starters, who said human their rights violations go wholesale with their economic policy (and you can't have one without the other)? Second, well, the US is not some paragon of freedom either compared to many western countries. From the largest prison population per capita (25% of the worlds inmates for 4% of the worlds population…

>>From the largest prison population per capita (25% of the worlds inmates for 4% of the worlds population)

Some of that is because many nations massively under report their prison population (aka China).

I agree that the US has over criminalized Society, namely in the failed attempt to curb drug abuse by criminal enforcement

>>to slavery

yes yes, the US is the only nation to ever have slavery in all of history... ::rolleyes::

>> Jim Crow, redlining, seggregation until 1970s, Japanese interment camps, the only country dropping atomic bombs (and to civilians nonetheless), McCarthyism, mass surveillance, and so on, all the way to Bush, Trump, and co (including the multi-war supporter Obama), plus constant meddling on foreign countries, invasions and occupations, etc., all the way to waterboarding, and such, yeah, I'd take "socialist" Denmark over it...

I guess that depends on where you place your personal freedoms, All of those things are terrible, most of them are historic atrocities that many nations unfortunately have in their past, or the more modern ones impacted a small number of citizens, and they all universally hated by the population.

However with socialism even Denmark style socialism my Income would be massively stolen errr "taxed", I would not have many of my core freedoms (aka Self Defense / gun rights), I would not have the same free speech protections as the US, etc.

These all do impact me directly...

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#264

This sounds to me like the classic “replication is not backups” situation where (at best) all of the user files were stored in RAID array someplace and that is what the malware ate. If there had been actual backups and effective backups then it should have been trivial to restore non-corrupted files. It also sounds like someone made the decision not to backup the raw images because they were “big” - that is actually…

What’s the difference between replication and backups? Is the distinction that backups must be stored on separate infrastructure, whereas replication might still be 1 or 2 points of failure?

The problem is that most replication setups will replicate deletes (and other modifications) as well. So if misbehaving software deletes (or corrupts) things, those deletes (or corruptions) will be replicated, and the replication does not give you a way to actually recover from a mistaken delete.

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you make of comparable services from other providers, say, Amazon Glacier?

I've used glacier. For stuff you don't need to restore in a rush, it's cheap. I did however have a recent health scare and it made me wonder how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the interfaces are all heavy. Not a factor I'd previously considered when assessing my backup/restore.

> For stuff you don't need to restore in a rush, it's cheap

That was my thinking. It seems a good fit as a last-resort backup. Low month-on-month storage costs, high retrieval costs. So we're essentially betting that we'll never retrieve the data. Which seems fine.

Also, it apparently has strong assurances against data-loss. Lots of nines. [0]

> how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the interfaces are all heavy

It's all web-API-based, right? Is there a a decent FOSS GUI to navigate it?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/features/

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#266
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A farmer's donkey dies. His son gets an idea on how to make some money. Sometime later he turns up at dinner with $200. "Where did you get that money?" His father asks. "I sold raffle tickets for the donkey" his son replied. "What?!?" Shouts his father. "You can't sell raffle tickets for a donkey that you know has already died! Weren't people mad?" "Just the guy who won" said the son, "so I gave him his money back."

Really, he'd want the value of a donkey - not his money back. But with a raffle, the 'take' can easily exceed the cost of the prizes. So I guess the son would still make out ok.

He would want the value of the donkey. The son would offer the value of the tickets. Lawyers would make it somewhere in the middle. Then the lawyers would walk off with all the money.

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#267
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is insane to me that anyone would point to china as a example of how the rest of the world should operate. If you do clearly you place no value on what most people call Basic Human Rights. I don't like the human rights abuses in China. But that doesn't mean they don't do anything well. Such an argument is silly. I could makes a similar claim about the US. How does the US do on the right to healthcare for example…

>>I could makes a similar claim about the US. How does the US do on the right to healthcare for example? Awfully. Well first and foremost Healthcare is not a right. It is a Service that has to be provided based on limited resources Rights are things like Free Speech, the Right to Self Defense, the right to not have your property stolen, etc Aka Negative Rights The right to be free from abuse Things like "health care"…

The fact that you don't see things like healthcare as a right is precisely my criticism of your system. Of course everything is subject to limited resources and external constraints. Enforcing property laws is subject to limits on policing resources.

How is "the right to not have your property stolen" any different from "the right to not have preventable diseases from killing or harming you"? In both cases there is some external problem that is prevented through the use of resources: in one case it's the police and legal apparatus. In the other case it's healthcare providers.

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used glacier. For stuff you don't need to restore in a rush, it's cheap. I did however have a recent health scare and it made me wonder how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the interfaces are all heavy. Not a factor I'd previously considered when assessing my backup/restore.

> For stuff you don't need to restore in a rush, it's cheap That was my thinking. It seems a good fit as a last-resort backup. Low month-on-month storage costs, high retrieval costs. So we're essentially betting that we'll never retrieve the data. Which seems fine. Also, it apparently has strong assurances against data-loss. Lots of nines. [0] > how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the inter…

If you retrieve the data slowly it's cheap. It's expensive if say you are a retailer who needs their database restored asap.

I use a Linux perl client!

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add to that, that the offsite one should also be off line .

Or at least in an append only data store.

Though, tread carefully there. If the thing that makes it append only is that you're just not using its destructive update features, then the store isn't really append only. Just because everyone agreed to limit the ways they interact with the data store doesn't mean you can trust buggy code, sloppy programming, and attackers to honor that agreement.

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#270
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replication is about having data level redundancy to protect from drive failure. Backups are about having point in time snapshots of the system state, and about having them tiered from a location perspective. The 3-2-1[1] principle says to have 3 total copies, 2 of which are local but on different devices, and 1 of which is offsite. This gives you tiers of recoverability. It’s important from a backup perspective that…

I would add to that, that the offsite one should also be off line .

That’s a lot harder to pull off. What methods do you use to accomplish this?
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