WD has a teensy little oops

[Mercutio]

Bad guys compromised WD's cloud storage services and WD doesn't know what they took yet.

 

[LunarMist]

Apparently some clueless users store everything there and are not happy. It buggers the mind how people do silly things like that.

 

[Mercutio]

People do not understand storage.

 

[LunarMist]

Is it possible that some people don't even know where their data is, local or remote?

 

[Mercutio]

It absolutely is, especially for people used to mobile devices. This is also why I absolutely hate OneDrive on Windows.

 

[jtr1962]

Is it possible that some people don't even know where their data is, local or remote?

I hate to say it but I'd say most people are in that category. I never liked the idea of cloud storage without any local physical backups. You're depending upon a third party to keep your data safe. You're also depending upon the Internet to access it.

 

[ddrueding]

I do personal physical backups, but they aren't local. The original is local, the backup is at another location I control on hardware I manage. And that is backed up to the cloud. I would bet that on a long enough timeline my physical primary and my physical remote combined are not as reliable as my (fully encrypted) backups on AWS.

 

[Mercutio]

Older LTO drives are not terribly expensive and the tapes are very reasonably priced. I *have* heard of big providers losing end user data, but never for big customers. There are definitely some famous cases as well: Myspace, LiveJournal and Yahoo are all fantastic examples of enterprises that have had major data loss events. Any of those guys should have had the budget to have geographically distributed backups across multiple types of media. All of them still lost vast amounts of data.

I use Crashplan for my own stuff on top of tapes. Pictures go to Amazon Photos (which DOES accept .CR3 and .ARW files without a storage quota) and some things are mirrored to a personal system at my datacenter as well.

 

[LunarMist]

For those of us not in IT I assumed the options are more limited. The last time I checked the costs escalated and over 50TB required a business plan. The recovery costs were quite high for the hard drives.

 

[Mercutio]

For reference, it's possible to buy an LTO5 SAS drive for $100 - $200 and 1.5TB tapes can be had for $10 each in bulk. The costs become similar to buying a high capacity single hard drive, but tape is more affordable as need for capacity increases.