back to article OVH says some customer data and configs can’t be recovered after fire, some seems to be OK, plenty is safe

There’s good news and bad news for customers of French cloud operator OVH. The good is that it has backups of some systems impacted by last week’s fire that destroyed one of its four data centres in the French city of Strasbourg. The bad news is that it doesn’t have backups of some systems impacted by last week’s fire that, …

  1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Even with backups...

    There may be data missing, depending on the time of backup. (STBO)

    I can imagine that there may be chronological issues too if data is migrated internally to support multiple points of presence.

  2. Warm Braw

    Backups - in the heat of the moment

    Backup of cloud systems doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves. No real problem when you're doing it incrementally or simply replicating transactions to a standby system, but if you need to copy and restore TBs of data because of an incident, or just so swap to another cloud vendor you're potentially looking at significant elapsed time and bandwidth cost.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

      "No real problem when you're ... simply replicating transactions to a standby system"

      The real problem is getting it past the bean-counters. "We're paying how much for this? And you want to pay the same again for another one just in case?"

      Remember that this was all too often sold on the basis that it makes problems like this go away. Of course all it does is make them just go out of sight.

      1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

        Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

        Fortunately, this incident will make a couple of bean counters go away, shame about the productive people who also lost a job.

      2. Potemkine! Silver badge

        Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

        Remember that this was all too often sold on the basis that it makes problems like this go away.

        Simple answer from bean counters: always blame the techies.

        1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

          Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

          And the techies in turn will blame the bean counters and have the documentation (denied funding) to prove their point.

          1. Eclectic Man Silver badge

            Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

            But the bean counters report to 'The Management' who made the decisions (based on advice from the Techies and the Bean Counters).

            And so the recursion continues - until 'The Management' realises that they are in charge and can blame whomsoever they choose, provided the shareholders don't get uppity and blame them. But if they are senior enough, 'The Management' will doubtless get jobs elsewhere with their chums, and their merry-go-round will continue.

            1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

              Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

              But the bean counters report to 'The Management' who made the decisions (based on advice from the Techies and the Bean Counters).

              Doesn't really matter, any major company without a competent Techie at the "C"-level (CIO) is doomed anyway.

          2. Aitor 1

            Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

            Yet they have np one to show it to, it is the beancounters that have the ear of the king of rohan, I mean, the company.

      3. Muppet Boss
        Coat

        Re: Backups - in the heat of the moment

        >The real problem is getting it past the bean-counters. "We're paying how much for this? And you want to pay the same again for another one just in case?"

        "If we only have one and lose it as a result on an unlikely catastrophic event, the company will cease operations and be unable to recover. Please kindly sign here that you are happy to accept this risk".

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There’s good news and bad news for customers of French cloud operator OVH

    so, the company that claims to provide backup (for money) doesn't provide backup? Vapourware!

  4. Headley_Grange Silver badge

    Do as I say, not as I do

    Their first response to their customers recommended that they "...activate their business recovery plan..". Great advice from a company that doesn't seem to have one of its own.

  5. wolfetone Silver badge
    Trollface

    The spammers must be livid that all of the data they bought off of t'Dark Internet is now lost.

  6. Val Halla

    Hey Octave

    What is this DRP of which you speak?

  7. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    Terminator

    How did those magnesium server racks work out?

    1. TimMaher Silver badge
      Coat

      Server racks

      I thought that they were handcrafted, out of mature rosewood, by highly skilled cabinet makers.

      Mine has the spoke shave and compasses in the pocket.

  8. Potemkine! Silver badge
    Coat

    It seems the fire started from 2 UPS, one which had maintenance the same day the fire broke.

    Next time try Fedex!

    1. Eclectic Man Silver badge

      So the question is whether they can blame the maintenance engineer(s), or whether said person(s) can prove they did the job according to the manufacturer's instructions, and left no mess.

    2. Muppet Boss
      Joke

      >It seems the fire started from 2 UPS, one which had maintenance the same day the fire broke.

      Apparently their servers were connected by Firewire at some moment.

    3. anothercynic Silver badge

      But a UPS fire shouldn't send the entire datacentre up in flames!!! Sorry, but that's just bad design.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So backups (where provided) are clearly not off site, perhaps not even out of data centre. Very poor.

    One of the problems with many cloud providers is they seemingly purposely produce backups which you can not download, let alone spin up somewhere else if need be.

    Fortunately I have managed to work out how to do a backup and restore of a tar backup for centos and ubuntu so I have at least a fighting chance of disaster recovery is my providers backups aren't available. I use them to replicate our live VM's on to a local VM box for testing. In addition I have daily rsync's of a static data backup and replication of data during the day.

    1. sebbb

      erm... it depends if those customers -PAID- for off site backups. AFAIK, those who were paying for the service called "FTP Backup" are safe because those were transferred at Roubaix DC. It's the same drill with every cloud provider, example: Azure Backups, nice. Then you use LRS (locally redundant storage) because it costs less and this happens, you lost backups there as well. "But Geo-redundant storage is expensive!", will say the bean counters...

  10. Tim Brown 1

    So SBG4 was undamaged where my server is

    But the reconnecting of servers has gone up from the initial estimate of today the 15th to "a gradual restart" on the 22nd, so 2 weeks downtime for a building that "wasn't damaged"

    Sheeh.

    1. Aitor 1

      Re: So SBG4 was undamaged where my server is

      So for most people, for all intent and purposes the server was destroyed.

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