
One example of why you should do your own back-ups  - oliverdamian
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/aarons-web-disaster-followed-by-150000-legal-threat-20120220-1tii5.html
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ghshephard
Let's be clear - nobody cares about backups. Any seasoned SysAdmin (That is,
one who has been axed, or been on a team where someone was axed for not having
a proper recovery process in place) will tell you that restores (and the
testing of said restores) is what is essential.

Weekly/monthly testing of restores is critical - preferably in an automated
fashion.

People would be amazed to know how many large enterprises have invested 10s of
millions of dollars in large tape array/robots, which they religiously back up
petabytes of data to, without actually knowing whether they'll be able to
restore properly should the day come that they need to.

~~~
gojomo
Indeed, and this goes for home backups too. You never know something is there
unless you test recovering it.

For example: Apple's Time Machine seems like a slick, safe way to backup your
entire hard drive. And, you can use it to transfer the entire old drive to a
new drive. But, if there is an I/O error reading any of the files on backup,
it will simply _skip that file_ , and the only indication of a problem is in
the /var/log/system.log. It can skip the file for months... eventually
reaching the point where any older backup where the file _was_ successfully
read is aged out. And even on recovery: the file was skipped, so there's no
indication it's even missing. Only when an app needs it is there any
indication that months of backups, and a supposed full-recovery, had silent
failures.

~~~
chetan51
Is this the case even in the latest versions of the OS and Time Machine?

I see an small app opportunity here.

~~~
gojomo
Through lion at least.

There are a couple 3rd-party apps to address: one's called 'Time Machine
Buddy' and another is 'Log Viewer for Time Machine'. Neither is super-slick
(or seems to do anything more than grepping /var/log/system.log for backupd
info), but they cover the basic need... once you know it's an issue, which may
only happen after being bitten.

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jkahn
It's not surprising that this has now made it international.

If you read into the history, the guy clearly did not follow basic
instructions. Backups are not part of the service he bought; yet the host
backed up anyway. The host informed him that backups were disabled on this
account because it was over quota and he did nothing to resolve the situation.
He took no backups of his own.

He only lost his data because he failed to follow instructions or respond to
emails and subsequently cancelled his shared hosting account before the data
had been migrated over to a new VPS service.

I think the hosting company were in the right here.

Here's the forum thread for those that are interested:
<http://forums.ventraip.com.au/showthread.php?t=5572>

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keypusher
It says right at the top that the owner "has limited tech knowledge". It's
clear that he suffered the cost of trusting his hosting company to do this for
him, but the real problem here seems to be trying to run a large website as a
business without having any idea how it works.

------
pan69
It's pretty unbelievable that a hosting company like that doesn't make backups
for their customers by default. Even if the guy didn't follow the
"instructions" to the letter you can still assume that the hosting company are
the experts here. And why are these guys physically deleting files on
cancellation of an account? Pretty amateur if you'd ask me.

~~~
rickmb
Here's why a hosting company doesn't make backups by default: _it costs
money_. You can either be a premium hosting party where the service is all
inclusive, or you can offer your services a la carte, where customers can
choose what they want and pay for. Both are valid business models, either way,
TANSTAFL.

It's up to the customer to choose. Why would a business give shit away for
free _after_ the client made their choice not to buy it?

And as far as I can tell they didn't "physically delete files", they just
pulled the plug on a VPS _as per the clients requests_. You think being able
to terminate an EC2 instance is amateurish from Amazon?

------
rokhayakebe
Man, Godaddy pulled a similar trick on me. It was totally our fault that we
screwed up our server, and things were in a limbo. Their advise was to
provisionne a new server. I asked them about the data, they told me it was
gone, and that's why I need to backup. I had to fight back and forth and
ensure we didn't provisionne a new server. They were CONVINCED the data was
gone. After a small fix from our end, the data was back and everything ok. Had
I followed their advise, one year of daily work would have been poof gone.
Incompetent.

------
notatoad
also an example of why you shouldn't be a moron. the host instructed him to
cancel his service before he was migrated over to a new server, and he did?
what the hell was he thinking?

not saying the host is innocent here, but the 'victim' is really only a victim
of his own stupidity.

~~~
larrys
Based on my experience with end users I wouldn't call his behavior moronic. I
would say it's about average.

We regularly have people who go into their accounts and change dns without
realizing what that means. They only know that either the web "guy" or the new
host told them to do that. Or they read they should do that in the setup
instructions.

They may not have purchased email service at the new host and they think that
everything will just work.

Many times if they speak to 1st level tech support at the new host they don't
know enough to even know what will or will not happen with a dns server
change.

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yabai
So the message is...do your own backups and hire an attorney to do the rest!

~~~
oliverdamian
Or have something like the EFF but focused on young web businesses which could
be funded by web business elders [those who already made money from the common
web ecosystem] to protect the rights of web businesses especially those who
are just starting-up and to advocate/design/lobby for legal systems that are
conducive to the web ecosystem as a whole. For legal practitioners, this would
arguably be a better place to work for(if one can earn a living from it)
rather than let's say working for patent trolls.

------
dekz
Wow this is just silly. This event could've easily been avoided and all this
VentraIP company has gained is a shitstorm. Surely this host could have a
process where the migration from one account to another requires the data be
transferred before any account cancellation and deletion. Stop playing the
blame game and think of how you should treat your customers.

The posts from the VentraIP representatives on the Whirlpool forums are also
childish. Companies like this make me sad to be in the Australia IT sector.

~~~
redslazer
I am a customer of ventraip but only for my budget sites. They have built a
very good dashboard which allows you to do most of what you would need.

If you try to do something is that is not built into the dashboard it becomes
extremly difficult and their customer service is often of no help. Having had
to transfer one of my domains from there economy plan to a business plan. I
had to cancel the economy plan first to disconnect the domain and then add it
to the new server.

If i had no been technically proficient and been aware that i needed to take a
cpanel backup before deleting the account so as to be able to restore it, i
would have been in the same position as this gentleman.

Ventraip really causes shockwaves in the Australia hosting industry because
the competition is overprices and inefficient. There system worked well while
only technically capable people used them but once you have beginners using
your system you better make it fool proof. I hope they learn a lot from this
debacle.

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viana007
I've seen similar cases in the past. In one case, I did web scraping, using
Google's cache to recover partially.

~~~
paultz
yes but you have to be quick also wayback machine has a copy dated 6th june
2011

