Cloud backups offer convenience and scalability, but as some outages have shown, they are not immune to catastrophic failures. The 2012 StorageCraft incident, in which a botched cloud migration led to the loss of customer backup data and metadata, serves as a stark reminder of the risks involved and the importance of meticulous planning and…
The recent Rackspace ransomware attack has sent shockwaves through the IT community, leaving thousands of customers without access to their critical data and forcing the company to make tough decisions to mitigate the damage. As an IT professional with decades of experience in backup and disaster recovery, I’ve been closely following this incident and analyzing…
In the world of cloud backup, entrusting your valuable data to a third-party provider requires a great deal of faith and due diligence. However, the story of Carbonite, a once prominent cloud backup provider, serves as a stark reminder of the risks involved when that trust is misplaced. (This blog post summarizes the main points…
In May 2019, Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform, experienced a significant data security incident that sent shockwaves through the SaaS community. A faulty script update accidentally granted “modify all” permissions to every user in every customer org, leaving sensitive data vulnerable to unauthorized access and modification. (This blog post summarizes the latest episode of…
Another doozy of a cloud disaster… In the latest episode of The Backup Wrap-up, we dove deep into the jaw-dropping tale of KPMG’s Microsoft 365 data loss debacle. This global consulting behemoth found itself in a world of hurt when an admin accidentally nuked months of critical Teams chat data for a mind-boggling 145,000 employees,…
The 2021 OVHCloud data center fire was the stuff of nightmares for anyone in the data protection biz. This wasn’t just a minor hiccup; it was a full-blown catastrophe that left countless customers high and dry, wondering where their precious data went. Many never got their data back. (This blog post summarizes the latest episode…
What do I always tell you in my books, blogs, and podcast? Don’t use your backup system as an archive system. And heaven help you the day you try to satisfy a big e-discovery case using only backup tapes. I often say that doing so can result in what the legal world calls an adverse…
Here is the cautionary tale of Musey – yet another tragic story of cloud data loss that should serve as a wake-up call to all of us. Musey was a promising startup pouring millions into developing an innovative interior design app. But in an instant, an admin’s slip-up led to their entire Google Workspace account…
As a long-time backup & recovery expert, I’ve seen a lot of backup plans go wrong. But few tales are as tragic or illustrative as the 2014 hack that utterly decimated Code Spaces. They lost their entire cloud platform and 200 clients’ data – all thanks to putting too much trust in cloud redundancy. (This…
Cohesity announced last night that it would acquire the NetBackup & Alta assets of Veritas, to create a company with a combined annual revenue of $1.6B. So many thoughts. I remember when Veritas acquired BackupExec from Seagate in 1999 and said they would combine the product lines, which never happened. I remember when Symantec acquired…