Re: It's in the cloud
Personally, I would say that it is the customer's job (for these services, low cost and unmanaged) to ensure there are reliable backups, just as it would be with self-hosted systems.
HOWEVER, 123-reg's failure here is a clear case of negligence, probably gross negligence, and I would expect a clear cut case in court. If I did this as a contractor, I would expect to be sued, whether the client had backups or not.
Also, this sort of service is often used by non-technical people. They don't understand the risks of not having a backup, or expect the service provider to back up for them.
Any professional worth his salt running anything on this kind of server will have a robust backup and DR scheme, and will have tested restoring the backup on both another system from the same SP and on alternative systems. The only people outside 123-reg I can't feel any sympathy for are those IT professionals who lost data through neglecting backups. They should hang their heads in shame. While in this case the problem came down to human error, there are numerous failure modes which are down to dumb luck (multiple disk failures, natural disasters, etc) which they should have been covering off with a decent backup & DR plan.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
