Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

digitalcameraworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 419 posts

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

#351

Post by irrational »

dharma1 wrote: post #297

Japanese camera companies are really bad at cloud software - Sony Playmemories probably the worst offender. Also the in-camera "mini-apps" tend to be terrible. They make good hardware but horrible software. They should really buy a computational photography company that also knows how to make good web and native apps, like https://skylum.com/

We were actually on NTT (Nipon Telegraph and Telephone) cloud for many many years up until very recently. At the time we started using them AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. did not exist. But over the past few years the quality of service has dropped considerably. My guess is that their best engineers were being poached by AWS, Azure, etc. and the leftovers couldn't keep it up.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

bscphil wrote: post #323
wtracy wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "raw" I think GP meant the files originally provided by the users, not actual RAW files.

That might be the case. Admittedly I don't know much about this cloud platform, and the article doesn't fill in a lot of details, but I would naively have assumed the target audience for something like this would be pro and semi-pro users, who would want to store RAW files, since amateurs and those just looking to share photos would get more out of Flickr, or even Google Photos / Facebook / Twitter / etc.

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by count »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #300
reaperducer wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about S3, but isn't S3, by definition, online, not offline?

I’ve always wondered if Amazon backs up S3. I don’t think they explicitly say but I get the impression that it is the user’s responsibility to replicate to a second region to guard against data loss so I am guessing not. Object Lock wouldn’t protect against an S3 failure.

They say it's designed to provide significant durability : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/DataDurabili... (99.999999999% durable over a year per object, and able to sustain data loss in 2 facilities).

Given the peeks that amazon has provided into the scale of S3, I don't know if you CAN 'back it up'.

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

#355

Post by danudey »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #206

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…

Not to mention no delayed deletion.

Ideally, a "delete" should mark images as unavailable and queue them for deletion at a later date (e.g. in 30 days). This provides protection against accidental deletion by users, accidental account deletions/deactivations, paid accounts terminated due to lack of payment, automated software mistakes (such as this), and so on.

The last company I worked at, 80% of our database was inactive, useless, or redundant data, all kept to protect against all kinds of issues (such as reused usernames, subpoenas, annual reporting, etc). We could always zero out PII from an account, but we never removed a record we didn't have to. It led to a lot more RAID migrations than I would have liked to have done, but it certainly made the application easier to manage. Plus, we never worried about fragmentation or holes in our data files, cascading deletes, etc.

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

#356

Post by dheera »

jiofih wrote: post #106
cbg0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely than not some manager decided all those extra nines weren't really necessary.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted since you can clearly see echoes of this manager in the comments above...

Too many managers, not enough engineers on HN. As an engineer I can definitely attest to managers saying "99.9% is enough"

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

#358

Post by owenmarshall »

teawrecks wrote: post #327
bscphil wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also sounds like someone made the decision not to backup the raw images because they were “big” - that is actually the one thing they should have backed up because all of the smaller files can be regenerated from the raw ones. Ironically my experience has been exactly the opposite. It's the demosaic-ed, fully developed copies of my photos that are larger and harder to preserve than the original RAWs. And these f…

I'm not sold. In the cases where you lose the raw vs a post processed image, one of those is significantly more lost information. It may be non trivial to reproduce a post process image from a raw image, but the other way around is usually impossible. In one case you've lost original sensor information, in the other case you've lost some parameters and possibly the algorithm used. The former is infinitely more diffic…

My wife shoots weddings. A wedding lasts an hour, the reception maybe three or four. She’ll spend the better part of a week editing the whole event.

Raw images seem to be very important until the very moment they’ve been edited (or, hell, rejected from editing). Then their worth is very little.

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

#359

Post by csydas »

reaperducer wrote: post #290
randoramax wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S3 bucket with object lock is as offline and convenient as it gets

I don't know much about S3, but isn't S3, by definition, online, not offline?

AWS S3 (and a few compliant providers) offer immutable options, both in governance/compliance mode.

Allegedly, compliance mode is unalterable by any account period, I guess the equivalent of the immutable attribute without an overriding account. I'm not immediately familiar with any literature on attacks on this feature, but I've also not searched hard; however, I know from my clients that it's an accepted form of WORM, and that cloud storages like S3 are considered in the same vein as tape when immutability is in play.

I suppose it will be a case in the future that proves the efficacy of AWS/Azure/s3 providers, but for now, a lot of regulatory policies for 3-2-1 allow for such storage to fulfill the "2" part of the 3-2-1 rule.

Post reply on HN