Just stop thinking your shit is safe in the "cloud" people. It isn't. And trusting in a single company to have your back, or even care about you is naive at best.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Why I have everything backed up on a hard drive of my own. Wish could build my own server, but don't have the funds at this time. But pretty close just starting my own internet.
You can run a basic server with an old laptop, desktop, mini-pc, anything. Everyone starts somewhere. If you eventually need 'more' or 'better', you can figure things out then. Getting started with a used office PC for 40$ off eBay (or anything old you already have) is fine. Just get started.
I have an old Toshiba laptop that put Linux on, I wouldn't mind turning into a server. I want to build a new gaming rig, then I can take my current rig and turn it into a big server. Definitely like to just wire me and my two sons rigs into our own private network.
Just try it with the old laptop. I personally found dietpi the incredibly easy entry. Super bare bones Linux actually meant for raspberry pi and such, but you can run it on any old laptop. Using your all gaming rig might be a high energy usage if you're just gonna run barely more than a NAS. If you do it with the laptop, take out the battery or put a timer on charger outlet, permanently connected and charging with a system that isn't actively managing the battery and charging could get you a spicy pillow quickly.
That's perfect! I ran my server on an old HP laptop for 2 years before I put together a desktop SFF server with 2nd hand gaming PC parts.
Just throw Debian or opensuse MicroOS on it and take off!
Even for a step in between the two if you need more storage, I used one of these docking stations that you can get for cheap to add more storage.
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My NAS is a 10+ year old Dell XPS that I just shoved new drives into. I need to get a rack mounted low power server to replace it but it works fine for now.
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The cloud is, and always has been, merely other people’s computers.
Their only legitimate use case is as disposable, transient, dumb nodes and synapses of a system you retain control and agency of.
It's truly amazing that Amazon is able to convince anyone that it's a good idea to store valuable business data on their computers
People are so eager to relinquish control of their business, even their life, for the tiniest bit of convenience.
Before anyone says “you put all your eggs in one basket,” let me be clear: I didn’t. I put them in one provider, with what should have been bulletproof redundancy
This shouldn't happen and the OOP clearly knows what he was doing but putting everything in a single provider with multiple services clearly is not redundancy.
Multi-cloud is a significant amount of effort to pull off.
Being on one cloud provider across multiple regions is often plenty of redundancy.
Being available across multiple cloud providers is really REALLY difficult
Multi-cloud is difficult, that's true. But having backups outside the single cloud is easy.
That way if your cloud provider pulls the plug, you will have to reconfigure everything but at least your data stays intact.
To be able to recover from something like that you don't need multiple working cloud setups. You just need backups, so that in an event like OOP's, you spend a few weeks rebuilding the configurations instead of years rebuilding your projects.
It really depends, pulling hundreds of GiB out of AWS for backing up on say GCS is going to add up extremely quickly. The cloud companies make it intentionally painful to leave or interop.
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In terms of service availability, yes.
In terms of data backup, no.
The author put it well:
What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.
Multi-region cloud computing is already difficult and expensive enough, multi-cloud is not only technically complex but financially and legally fraught with uncertainties. At that point you're giving up so much of the promise of cloud computing that you might as well rent rack space somewhere, install bare-metal infra, and pay someone to drive there to manually backup to tape every 3 months.
This level of technical purity is economically unfeasible for virtually everyone, that's the whole point of paying a vendor to deal with it for us. And you know who doesn't need to put up with the insane overhead of multi-cloud setups? That's right, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who will be getting paid for hosting everyone else's multi-cloud setups while they get to run their huge infra on their own cloud without fear. The last thing GAFAM competitors - especially OSS projects - need is even fewer economies of scale.
Stop with the victim-blaming, this blunder is squarely on AWS.
Yeah this is the right take, IMO.
Good on you to those of you who actually do multi-cloud backups.
Even if this was just a loss of their infrastructure, it would be catastrophic to any company without good infrastructure as code practices.
Not to mention the downtime.
This sure as shit doesn’t look “customer obsessed”.
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Yeah, but he was paying the provider for providing the redundancy on this level.
We shouldn't blame him on the technical level for what is a problem with the provider on the organizational level. If this had happened to a Fortune 500 company, Amazon would have had an army of lawyers descend on them.
"i didn't put all my eggs in one basket, i put them multiple metal boxes... that i paid the same guy to hold for me. it's different."
During the entire article I kept thinking how it wasn't best practice to use the same cloud for everything, that you needed a different cloud because occasionally, your account can just get nuked from orbit. People dont understand that these corporations are really just held together with luck prayers and duct tape. Software enables us to develop in the worst ways possible, and then call it production.
Platform decay strikes again.
Bezos and the shareholders weren't happy with AWS already being one of the single most profitable products in human history, because capitalism demands unending infinite year-on-year growth.
Whenever you hear them cry that capitalism breeds innovation, the kinds of innovation they're talking about are this shitty AI profit-maximising algorithm that created OOP's problem. This isn't a crazy conspiracy theory either; I've consulted in the software dev teams of dozens of major multinationals and the projects were always, without exception, some variant on "how can we replace people" or "how can we reduce costs by doing something slightly worse".
I've consulted in the software dev teams of dozens of major multinationals and the projects were always, without exception, some variant on "how can we replace people" or "how can we reduce costs by doing something slightly worse".
Always might be an overstatement, but this has been true over the past couple years for myself and the people I know at these companies. Especially right now - upper management seems to be deluded into thinking that LLMs can do anything, or more likely, they're just trying to sell hype like everyone else just to raise the stock price.
Before anyone says “you put all your eggs in one basket,” let me be clear: I didn’t. I put them in one provider, with what should have been bulletproof redundancy
Tldr; "I didn't put all my eggs in one basket. I put them into multiple smaller baskets and put those into one basket. That's still more than one basket right? ....right!?"
This is a really interesting read, but this dude missed a major component of best practices, which is that your architecture needs to be able to respond to a proper disaster, which includes Amazon just dropping out of the sky and nuking your entire account.
Frankly, it's shocking that he didn't have local copies or a home server that he kept backups too. I've seen some people mention that a multi-cloud architecture is hard to set up, which is true, it's also expensive, but I don't think it would be super hard to set up, like, a blob storage in Azure, or a Google Cloud Storage, to just keep backups of whatever you're working on. We should always keep in mind that our accounts getting locked is always a possibility.
It's kinda weird, normally when you hear about things like this, it's the other way around where somebody was running a major production component on personal infrastructure and couldn't handle the bare metal.
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Trust me, they never delete your data, just your account.
If they never deleted any data of close accounts, wouldn't that be a lot of wasted storage space? Wouldn't it be way too much data?
Sure, but they'll never make the effort to let you access your data.
Basically "try to sue us"
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This stuff terrifies me. I'm de-googling as fast as I can and reviewing all my local backups plus add encryption to what stays in the cloud.
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More reason that other countries developing smaller, regional cloud providers is a good thing. Part of the reason AWS thinks they can get away with this is that there are 2-3 other providers they compete with, and moving is onerous. If there were 200+ cloud providers, there would almost certainly be a standard set of tools and much better customer service.
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The author is an egotistical moron and you should save your time and avoid reading this article. As clearly nobody in the comments has. They just devolve into crying about how important they are, admit heaps of fault and hand wave it as not their problem, and then spout conspiracies about why their account was deleted.
Maybe... just maybe you could have just verified your account in time as you were contractually obligated to do. 3-4 business days with 5 days warning... you're just incompetent no matter how smart all your Ruby friends and "free AWS consulting" makes you feel.
This moron literally tried to insist that the premise wasn't that he put all his eggs in one basket because he had "multi-region replication" and claimed independence from US infrastructure.
News flash: AWS is the same company, and that "multi region replication" is AWS replicating their data, not yours. These are features of their platform that underpin their SLA and SLO contracts they signed with you, not YOUR use.
Sorry but this is bullshit. In no sane world is a 5-day warning a valid precursor to a irrevocable total wipe. People go on vacation. People get sick. This is an stupendously bad take.
Yes this developer did a mistake in trusting AWS like this, but this is still an AWS fault.
5 days including the weekend then wiping the account is utter bullshit. I think he should have had an off-site and for that I blame him, but this is a ridiculous take.
JFC this poor dev.
Luckily many of my jobs or clients don't like AWS and have gone elsewhere. One of my projects is self-hosted (with an off-site backup).
I wish this person the best moving forward, I didn't recommend AWS before, but I'll definitely make sure to push against it now.
and why you should never trust cloud providers with your only copy of anything
well, yeah. Even the old 3-2-1 backup policy is against that.
Fuck, this is bad.
Mr Bezos doesn't give a shit about you.
Never has. Never will.
Ruining your entire life doesn't bother him in the slightest.
He doesn't even give a shit about your money,
he has incomprehensibly vast amounts of money
and you don't make the tiniest molecule of difference to his life.
All he gives a shit about is
extracting
the largest possible amount of money
on average
from the largest possible pool of people
and businesses.
So you don't matter to him. Not even slightly.
He cares much, much more about a worm he's never seen that lives under his lawn than he cares about you.
And he doesn't give a fuck about the worm.
Quit giving Bezos your money, everyone. He doesn't need it. You do.
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I really need to start backups of my S3 bucket and my Hetzner Server to a local hard drive.
Ngl this guy comes off as a massive schizo and I dont believe the story is how he makes it out to be.
I laughed at the part where he went and cried to Grok and Chatgpt.
It's interesting that LLMs emotionally saved them, allowing them to bounce back from a destructive to a constructive mindset.
Reading another post of theirs, they seem to really love AI. Albeit in that post, it feels to me like they took AI responses too literally, with too much meaning (as if sentient, or ignoring potential training bias, etc).
Tha's what happens when you dance with the devil.
So, 3-2-1 backup, with other cloud service 🫤
Yeah thats what happens when you host your shit on some corporate "cloud", but will they learn from this and move to self hosting, or will they just find some smaller provider who can do the same rug pull again.
Well teach me the way to self host on the cheap?
Id be happy to, what kind of services are you wanting to run and whats your home internet setup?
I can message here on lemmy but it might be easier if you want to contact me directly through chat, my contact info can be found here: https://gravitywell.xyz/#contact
Oh nothing special just want to store my music, videos, and games, along with documents and have access to them from anywhere. I have gig a blast with Cox, and I also wouldn't mind hosting my own websites. Instead of paying for hosting to Siteground.com that can't even allow me to use Javascript in my code without costing hundreds of dollars a month.
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If my years have taught me anything, it's the latter.
Do you mean self-host on your own hardware and infrastructure? At home? Otherwise you'd still be dependent on the server or infrastructure providers.
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