You DO Backup Your Amazon Data, Don’t You?

A recent incident at Amazon US East-1 in Virginia is a good reminder about protecting your data.

On August 31st at 4:33 AM the datacenter lost power and the generators kicked in, but at 6:00 AM, the generators started failing.

The result of that was that 7%+ of  the AWS EC2 instances failed and some EBS volumes “became unavailable”.

Amazon’s explanation was that there are 10 data centers in US East 1 and 6 availability zones.  None of that helped anyone who was down, hard – nor their customers.

By 10:45 AM 99% of the users were back and by 12:30 PM that was up to 99.5%.

Amazon said that the power failure caused hardware failures and that hardware had to be replaced.

As a result, some users were down for days and other users lost their data forever.

Amazon says this about your data:

“As part of using Amazon EC2, you agree that your Amazon EC2 resources may be terminated or replaced due to failure, retirement or other AWS requirement(s). We have no liability whatsoever for any damages, liabilities, losses (including any corruption, deletion, or destruction or loss of data, applications or profits), or any other consequences resulting from the foregoing. “

Amazon offers a number of services that allow *YOU* to backup your data, but none of them are automatic and none of them are inherently bulletproof.

Dropbox says that they keep 120 days of backups, but they also say that are not responsible for any loss of data.

In fact, almost all online services say that they are not responsible for your data.

So what do you need to do?

Understand your contract.  If they lose your data, which might cost your hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild, if you can at all, they might give you a month’s free service worth a few hundred dollars or maybe a little more.  Or they might give you nothing.

In addition to losing your data, during the outage, which in this case lasted around 6-8 hours for the people who did get their data back, you are down.  If you are a service provider, your customers are also down and if the data is not recovered, your customers will not be happy.

While your cloud provider might give you a few bucks – or not – if you have customer service level agreements, you may have to pay your customers.

And, they might sue you.

Again, many providers – sometimes including Software as a Service providers, but not always –  offer ways to fail over and backup your data, but most of them are not free and are not automatic.

Do you have the level of protection that you need?

Source: Bleeping Computer.

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