Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

news.ycombinator.com

91–100 of 216 posts

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#91
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was replying to a bullshit claim that they cannot retain for more than 30 days no matter what. That's hiding behind the T&Cs instead of owning their decision not to even try because there is nothing in it for them.

So you're in favor of companies breaking their terms and conditions at will? I think that would cause quite a lot more outrage and problems.

So you're in favor of companies breaking their terms and conditions at will? I think that would cause quite a lot more outrage and problems.

Do you really never get e-mails from various companies every few weeks telling you that the terms of service have been updated?

I think I get one from eBay alone every other day.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#92

"I learned my lesson about not doing an offsite backup regularly" Heroku is a shitshow after the Salesforce takeover and not to shit on you because I know it really sucks. BUT please everyone, do offsite backups and test them. Please people. Please. If you have anything that is important, BACK THEM UP on your own outside of the provider. Heck, we wrote our own script to backup RDS databases offsite as well even thoug…

I spoke out loudly at a previous employer how it's really dumb to have our database and it's backups under a single AWS account. A single AWS account compromise, account issue (e.g. AWS shuts down account), or a disgruntled employee could result in the business being destroyed. They took some half-hearted efforts to back up the data, but it was far from ideal. Back up your data, and do it in different places so a fai…

Yeah pretty cheap and easy, at least relative to the value of data to most companies to setup a server you have physical control of to go download the backup once per day.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#93

A bit of a tangent, but my only real problem with Heroku involved a premium DB. Turns out that upgrading to premium enables high availability (HA) by default, and I don't even remember if you can disable it. HA replicates asynchronously to the standby master, so a master failover can cause a small amount of data loss. For my application, this was unacceptable, and I would have preferred unavailability instead (see CA…

Having a HA follower is the only different between Premium and Standard tiers, so I'm not really sure what else you expected them to do in this case. Like, premium-6 is 2x the cost of the standard-6 plan explicitly because of the HA follower.

Yes. I was inexperienced, saw "high availability," and didn't realize the standby could fall behind and lose data.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#94

"I learned my lesson about not doing an offsite backup regularly" Heroku is a shitshow after the Salesforce takeover and not to shit on you because I know it really sucks. BUT please everyone, do offsite backups and test them. Please people. Please. If you have anything that is important, BACK THEM UP on your own outside of the provider. Heck, we wrote our own script to backup RDS databases offsite as well even thoug…

Don't mind my curiosity but I wonder if you do offsite backup of your emails or just take it for granted that Gmail is a reliable enough service ? It is very important to me but I never even considered backing up my Google takeout data. The point I want to make is that service reliability is a critical factor when considering what to backup. It was expected from Heroku to do the right thing and be conservative in their approach.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#95
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was replying to a bullshit claim that they cannot retain for more than 30 days no matter what. That's hiding behind the T&Cs instead of owning their decision not to even try because there is nothing in it for them.

So you're in favor of companies breaking their terms and conditions at will? I think that would cause quite a lot more outrage and problems.

Contracts can be amended when all parties agree on a change.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a HA follower is the only different between Premium and Standard tiers, so I'm not really sure what else you expected them to do in this case. Like, premium-6 is 2x the cost of the standard-6 plan explicitly because of the HA follower.

Yes. I was inexperienced, saw "high availability," and didn't realize the standby could fall behind and lose data.

Also, it's worded like a strict improvement when really it's a tradeoff. You're sacrificing the guarantee of persistence for more availability. I feel like most people who know what this means are not going to want it.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#97

"I learned my lesson about not doing an offsite backup regularly" Heroku is a shitshow after the Salesforce takeover and not to shit on you because I know it really sucks. BUT please everyone, do offsite backups and test them. Please people. Please. If you have anything that is important, BACK THEM UP on your own outside of the provider. Heck, we wrote our own script to backup RDS databases offsite as well even thoug…

Don't mind my curiosity but I wonder if you do offsite backup of your emails or just take it for granted that Gmail is a reliable enough service ? It is very important to me but I never even considered backing up my Google takeout data. The point I want to make is that service reliability is a critical factor when considering what to backup. It was expected from Heroku to do the right thing and be conservative in the…

Anyone using Google products should absolutely backup their data regularly.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#99
post #20

This whole debacle has been such short-term thinking from Salesforce. That after carrying these free projects for years they couldn't stomach more than 30d of data retention is just the icing on the cake. In my view this has caused yet further reputational harm for Heroku, and is going to have a long-term effect on the bottom line from paid projects. The value prop of Heroku has always been being able to sleep at nig…

I assumed the value prop of being on Heroku in 2023 was purely "not having to do the pain in the butt to migrate your legacy app that you made on Heroku in the pre-2010 era" - in other words, I would be really shocked if Heroku got significant new business or any growth at all, now that it's just expensive AWS with some basic CI integration points. I also assume Salesforce only bought them as a cash generator and has…

> Salesforce on bought them as a cash generator

As an early Heroku employee, this gave me quite the chuckle.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#100
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I discussed this with our backend team and upon deeper investigation, we were able to confirm that there was some issue sending the notifications to your email." Nope.

That phrasing doesn't rule out an issue on your email server's end, like the email could have bounced. (Though I'm guessing that's unlikely.)

Would be surprised if that was this case - vanilla GSuite setup.
Post reply on HN