points by jacquesm 10 years ago

The idea here, and you seem to miss this point entirely is that for your company to fail then both systems would have to fail simultaneously. That is why you have back-ups. Any one system can fail, but for two systems (both the original and the back-up) to fail catastrophically at the same time is statistically very unlikely, and with a back-up here I am just talking about a secondary system that just pulls the data in on a regular basis. Tarsnap or a simple script that stores the data in a set of directories, anything is better than nothing if you lose all your data. Rebuilding will still take time, but at least there is something to rebuild with.

For any one system to fail is perfectly possible and in fact should be expected to happen at some point and that's why you design against that.

You also make sure that it is not the same people that have access to both systems so that if your sysadmin walks onto the floor with a bad hairday your back-ups will still be there. And this is also why you test your back-ups to make sure they actually work.

nsfyn55 10 years ago

And what you keep missing the point on is that Im not saying don't have a personal copy. I am saying if you have multiple copies the safest one is undoubtedly in the cloud and by no small margin.