
How Slack Lost Over 800,000 Messages - kailanb
https://medium.com/@kailanblanks/slack-lost-800k-messages-60018891c4e7
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dkonofalski
While that really, really sucks for the team (suggestion: take your latest
count and just keep a manual tally of the new messages, maybe?) the final
point they make is something that needs to be stressed over and over again.
Don't trust third-parties to care about your data. They may have backup
strategies in place or they might not. No one is going to care as much about
your data as you do and you should treat every piece of data as if you have
the only copy of it.

If it's important to you, then you are ultimately responsible for it.

~~~
kailanb
I agree with this completely. Although we may not have caused the issue, we
could have prevented the damage by having our own copies of the data. We'll be
doing this in the future.

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BrailleHunting
Hypothesis of "least surprise:" Sane defaults implies warning users about
impending destructive actions ie deletion), give them a chance (ie grace
period, lotsa warnings) to change settings and/or pay more money to keep large
datasets. Implicit, destructive system behavior is flawed by non-design.

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Cpoll
> no messages found from @slackbot retention.

Wouldn't that message have been purged after 7 days, along with the rest of
them?

~~~
kailanb
Only messages in public channels were removed, which is why we had a massive
proportion of private messages after the incident.

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storrgie
matrix.org

