The Wages Of Complacency

I tell you and tell you and tell you but you don’t listen. “Don’t entrust the only copy of your data to a third party”, I say. “But I’m a good guy and I’m not doing anything controversial. Besides, I’m using a serious, world class service to store my data. What could go wrong?”, you answer.

Ask Abdelkader Boudih. He’s an open source developer who not only isn’t doing anything wrong but is, actually, making all our lives better by contributing to the Ruby community. His work is, in fact, often used by AWS, the villain in this story.

Boudih is not Aunt Millie. He was careful to make sure that his data was backed up in multiple locations and that his encryption keys were stored separately from his data. In short, he followed AWS’ own best practices. It did him no good. After being a customer for 10 years, Boudoir’s account was deleted for unspecified reasons and his data was lost. Despite tenacious effort on his part, Boudih was not able to get a reason for the deletion.

But, as I say, Boudih is not your Aunt Millie. He has some compelling speculation as to what actually happened. See his post for the details but the TL;DR is that AWS support accidentally deleted his data and that rather than face the consequences of that with their management, pretended ignorance.

Boudih’s mistake was entrusting his data to a single third party. It doesn’t matter how many times they replicate it, they are still a single point of failure. They may go out of business—unlikely in Amazon’s case, admittedly—or they may decide for opaque internal reasons to simply disappear your data. Either way, your data is gone and you will almost certainly encounter a stone wall when you try to find out why.

This isn’t just an Amazon problem. Google is infamous for this sort of thing. And it’s getting worse because “AI” is now making these decisions. Nothing to worry about there unless you don’t like glue on your pizza.

Don’t become an Irreal poster child for this sort of thing. Make sure that you always have a local backup of your data or, at the very least, that it’s saved with more than one provider. Actually, the only safe option is keeping your own copy. Backup drives¹ are pretty cheap. Way cheaper than losing your data.