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

Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

status.gandi.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 389 posts

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

#151

Post by blibble »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #59

I have a custom domain with Gandi and take advantage of their mail forwarding option to forward the emails sent to the custom domain (my “no lock-in” email address) to my personal Gmail account. Considering how critical email is for me, seems like I won’t be trusting their MX servers to process all my inbound mail anymore and will soon be looking for another solution that works well with Gmail (don’t want to pay for…

gandi's response notwithstanding: email is hardly reliable

unless you run all the MXes (and can prove otherwise): you're likely having emails dropped all the time already

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

#152

Post by ben509 »

y4mi wrote: post #132
ben509 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a long article; please quote the part you're referring to so we're all looking at the same text. > a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event Since a "replica" is a copy, that seems technically correct.

all fruits are apples because apples are fruit, right?

Your definition claims "a backup is a copy."

The original claim was "a backup is a replication of the live dataset, although, usually out of sync to be useful when the main dataset goes bad."

The only thing that makes a replica special is that it's in sync. Once you add the caveat that it's out of sync, it's just a copy.

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

#153

Post by heurist »

rorykoehler wrote: post #56
aosaigh wrote: post #13

I don't have hosting with Gandi, but I do use them for domains and DNS. I'll be considering migrating my domains from them after this. Their response to this is exceptionally poor. To say essentially "this could happen to any other web host" it nonsense. I've never had this happen with any of the providers I've used for hosting and I'd be very angry if I had just lost an entire VPS. The fact that they've lost all sna…

Same boat. As much as I hate to give Jeff Bezos another penny I can't look further than AWS for everything at this stage.

FWIW, I've found GCP a pleasure to work with in comparison to AWS.

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

#154

Post by martius »

itake wrote: post #144
teh_klev wrote: post #130

The key question is, did Gandi offer and explicit backup service for your data on their plans? I just had a look and I don't see this being offered. As a former hosting engineer, at the risk of pissing on everyone's outrage parade, but unless an explicit guarantee of a backup is included in your plan's contract, or you can pay for backups as a bolt-on, then if you've lost data it's your fault for not planning for thi…

> Easily recover backups of previous versions of your website's files, thanks to our automatic Snapshots system. It's free! https://docs.gandi.net/en/simple_hosting/common_operations/s... They are supposed to be providing backups.

I believe nobody should count on backups provided by the product that stores your data.

There are different kinds of backups here:

* the ones that are part of the offer, where the provider gives you a convenient way to recover from your mistakes, this is a feature they provide when their services are operational (in this case, the snapshots feature).

* the ones they put in place to mitigate incidents and maintain their SLOs. If you accidentally delete a file, you don't have access to them, they are useless to you. These backups are a mean to reach their service level objectives. Nobody can offer you 100% guarantee that they won't lose your data in an SLO. If someones promises you this, just... don't believe it.

(edit: formatting, typo, mention snapshots in case 1)

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

#155

Post by Jasper_ »

moralestapia wrote: post #87

Whoops, so long with the "no bullshit" policy. I stopped using them a while ago but for a different reason. I used to use their website to check availability/whois for domains that I was interested in buying. If it was available I didn't buy it at the time but until I finished the website/app whatever I was going to put there, this took me a few months obviously. It happened to me that when I was finally ready the do…

I've heard that this isn't actually the registrar's fault, it's the registry's fault. So your TLD is sharing the "is registered" query with other parties. That said, everything about the domain registration industry seems designed to appear sketchy as all hell, so who knows.

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

#156

Post by binarysaurus »

EnderMB wrote: 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…

Julie Pelloille, responsible for comms, appears to be going a bit too far with this.

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

#157

Post by AYBABTME »

veeti wrote: post #82
celticmusic wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an incident similar to this with linode, which is why I use and recommend Digital Ocean nowadays. My machine going away because you had hardware issues isn't my problem, and I'll spend my money on a more competent company.

I had the exact same experience on Digital Ocean. Attempted to resize a VPS, the process got stuck for eternity, and support tells me all data is lost. Always have your own offsite backups.

To be clear, disk corruption can happen anywhere due to many reasons, in particular when VM disks map to local disks on an hypervisor, which gives you fast SSDs without network latency. Probably that the resize command had an issue and corrupted the image on disk. Then there's not much that can done aside from restoring from a backup. Having had backups enabled on the droplets, they would in all likelihood not have been corrupted since backups with DigitalOcean are stored offsite. In such case they could have been used to restore the droplet.

In some extreme cases, a concert of bad luck may coincides to ruin things despite multiple levels of redundancies. But that's extremely rare, especially nowadays. However DO is much larger now than it used to be, so the odds of hearing about extreme accidents increase.

disclaimer: I used to work there.

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

#158

Post by edoceo »

gruez wrote: post #138
jandrese wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domain registrars giving away domains to squatters when people search for them is a time honored practice. The advice I've seen is to not search for the domain first, just register it outright from the start. The domain registration business is run with all of the integrity and customer focus of TicketMaster.

>The advice I've seen is to not search for the domain first, just register it outright from the start. The domain registration business is run with all of the integrity and customer focus of TicketMaster. What if you don't want to cough up $10-$20 on a whim? Would doing a whois (using the NIC's whois site) suffice?

I use the whois command line tool when searching and have yet to get squatted. My experience is only about 500 domains over 20 years.

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

#159

Post by teh_klev »

itake wrote: post #144
teh_klev wrote: post #130

The key question is, did Gandi offer and explicit backup service for your data on their plans? I just had a look and I don't see this being offered. As a former hosting engineer, at the risk of pissing on everyone's outrage parade, but unless an explicit guarantee of a backup is included in your plan's contract, or you can pay for backups as a bolt-on, then if you've lost data it's your fault for not planning for thi…

> Easily recover backups of previous versions of your website's files, thanks to our automatic Snapshots system. It's free! https://docs.gandi.net/en/simple_hosting/common_operations/s... They are supposed to be providing backups.

Key question, is it guaranteed in your contract?

Also:

> Snapshots do not make a backup of your databases. If you would like to perform a backup of your databases, we recommend you perform an export, or launch a dump script via crontab.

For those plan prices if I was running anything mission critical there then I'd be making darned sure I was squirting copies of my site's dynamic data to somewhere else on a regular basis (and you should also be able to re-deploy your code from local). Even if there was a guarantee, I'd still have a backstop in place. Never underestimate the chance of a good cockup.

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

#160

Post by kossae »

gruez wrote: post #138
jandrese wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domain registrars giving away domains to squatters when people search for them is a time honored practice. The advice I've seen is to not search for the domain first, just register it outright from the start. The domain registration business is run with all of the integrity and customer focus of TicketMaster.

>The advice I've seen is to not search for the domain first, just register it outright from the start. The domain registration business is run with all of the integrity and customer focus of TicketMaster. What if you don't want to cough up $10-$20 on a whim? Would doing a whois (using the NIC's whois site) suffice?

I've had this same scenario happen before, and since then I just issue a `whois` from the command line to bypass any potential frontend interception. Not sure if that is 100% full proof either though.
Post reply on HN