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AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

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Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#91

Post by CamperBob2 »

foundry27 wrote: post #80
ageitgey wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get an AI vibe from this post. Grammar checkers add em dashes, too. If anything, an AI tool would have written a shorter, less rambling post.

It’s easy to be fooled, myself included it seems :) For context, here’s a handful of the ChatGPT cues I see. - “wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open‑source development” - “wasn’t standard AWS incompetence; this was something else entirely” - “you’re not being targeted; you’re being algorithmically categorized” - “isn’t a system failure; the architecture and promises are sound” - “This isn’t just about…

It's not the case in this article, but we're starting to see a lot of comments and blog posts from people who have something worthwhile to contribute, but who aren't confident enough in their English proficiency to post their thoughts without running them through an LLM for cleanup.

IMHO that's a good thing, something that should be encouraged. Counting the em dashes is just an exercise in missing the forest for the trees. Accusing someone of posting AI slop without evidence should be treated no differently here than accusing them of shilling or sock-puppetry. In other words, it should be prohibited by the site guidelines.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#92

Post by Jedd »

spiralcoaster wrote: post #37

The amount of self-aggrandizing and lack of self awareness tells me this author is doing to do all of this again. This post could be summed up with "I should have had backups. Lesson learned", but instead they deflect to whining about how their local desktop is a mess and they NEED to store everything remotely to stay organized. They're going to dazzle you with all of their hardened bunker this, and multiple escape r…

Yeah, that post was hard to read.

I'll concede that I'm hugely empathetic for people that suffer data loss. The pithy aphorism about there being two types of people -- those who haven't lost data, and those who do backups -- is doubly droll because only the second group really appreciates the phrase.

But it's surprising to find people with more than a decade in IT who don't appreciate the risks here.

The timeline reveals there were 13 days from when the first signs of trouble surfaced, to when the account was deleted. So a fortnight of very unsubtle reminders to do something AND a fortnight in which to act.

(I recently learned the phrase BATNA[0] and in modern IT where it's Turtles as a Service, all the way down, it's amazing how often this concept is applicable.)

Author seems very keen to blame his part-time sysadmin rather than his systems architect. I can understand the appeal of that blame distribution algorithm, but it's nonetheless misguided.

The phrasing:

> But here’s the dilemma they’ve created: What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup?

inverts the horse & cart. If you have a petabyte of data that's important, that you can't recreate from other sources, your concern is how to keep your data safe.

If you're paying someone to keep a copy, pay (at least one other) person to keep another copy. Even that isn't something I'd call safe though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#93

Post by lamontcg »

spiralcoaster wrote: post #37

The amount of self-aggrandizing and lack of self awareness tells me this author is doing to do all of this again. This post could be summed up with "I should have had backups. Lesson learned", but instead they deflect to whining about how their local desktop is a mess and they NEED to store everything remotely to stay organized. They're going to dazzle you with all of their hardened bunker this, and multiple escape r…

> Me: “You’re answering like I’m Piers Morgan asking ‘Do you condemn October 7th?’ and you reply with historical complexity dating to 1948.”

Yeah...

If I'm working tickets at AWS that kind of dickishness is going to ensure that I don't do more than the least amount of effort for you.

Maybe I could burn my entire weekend trying to see if I can rescue your data... or maybe I'm going to do nothing more than strictly follow procedure and let my boss know that I tried...

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#96

Post by dmead »

tguvot wrote: post #87
dmead wrote: post #33

Reddit deleted my 20 year old account with several warnings

Happened to me as well (permaban). Without any warning. You can request via help site data takeout under ccpa or gdpr. Took about two weeks but i got all my data

You still get access to log in and delete comments. I'll probably just use a tool to delete all my comments. Fuck em.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#97

Post by throwaway81523 »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #14
huksley wrote: post #7

If you are given only 5 days to comply with some request, that's how complicated your infra at AWS should be - so you can migrate to another provider in that time. Just use EC2 and basic primitives which are easy to migrate (ie S3, SES)

The amount of people shilling for a multi billion dollar corporation is baffling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification_theory_(s...

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#98

Post by roncesvalles »

ransom1538 wrote: post #73
floating-io wrote: post #12

My fear of this sort of thing happening is why I don't use github or gitlab.com for primary hosting of my source code; only mirrors. I do primary source control in house, and keep backups on top of that. It's also why nothing in my AWS account is "canonical storage". If I need, say, a database in AWS, it is live-mirrored to somewhere within my control, on hardware I own, even if that thing never sees any production t…

IMHO Lawyers get creative, a github account can show a ton of work activity, nda voilations, etc. Your "private repro" is just a phone call away from being a public repro.

Your whole GitHub account is a phone call away from being suspended due to frivolous IP/DMCA/what-have-you claims.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#99

Post by cnst »

adastra22 wrote: post #71
NewJazz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VMs were invented at AWS? Blob storage?

EC2? S3? Yes. That kind of "cloud" tech was invented at AWS. Nothing like the ec2 API existed before Amazon. It's what made AWS big. Maybe my graybeard is showing, but I remember when that kind of pre-containerization cloud provisioned VM resources was a radically new idea.

FreeBSD jail predates Amazon Web Services, and so does SWsoft's Virtuozzo that was subsequently open-sourced as OpenVZ. For Amazon SES, DJB's qmail made it possible to send a ridiculous amount of subscription emails very efficiently, too.

I've been using a VPS powered by Virtuozzo since like 2002 or 2003, how is EC2 all that different? Just the API?

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company), SWsoft was founded in 1997, and publicly released Virtuozzo in 2000.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail, FreeBSD jail was committed into FreeBSD in 1999 "after some period of production use by a hosting provider", and released with FreeBSD 4.0 in 2000.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail, qmail was released in 1998.

Today, lots of AWS services are basically just re-packaged OSS packages.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#100

Post by roncesvalles »

ProofHouse wrote: post #30

This has happened to me too destroyed five years of my life no joke. Obviously it wasn’t just the set up and pipelines that took only 4 to 6 months but as a chain reaction to collapsed the entire startup. It was so unexpected. Lesson learned.

If it takes more than a day to re-setup your cloud infra on a fresh account, consider investing time in going IaC-first.
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