Cloud Catasrophes: Musey deletes itself

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 getting erased. Just like that, over a year’s worth of product development stored in Google Drive vanished before their eyes – and the company never recovered.

(This blog post summarizes the latest episode of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. We’re in a series talking about major cloud disasters. If you’d like to check out the episode, you can do so here: https://www.backupwrapup.com/cloud-disasters-musey-deletes-their-own-company/)

In desperation, Musey frantically contacted Google, practically begging them to restore access to the priceless intellectual property they had lost. Google responded that there was simply nothing they could do. (I keep telling you; it’s not the cloud provider’s responsibility to back up your data!) Without a backup, the data was gone for good. Still in denial, Musey even tried suing Google in federal court to somehow get their files back. But deep down inside, I think they knew the battle was hopeless from the start.

What crushes me about this story is how preventable it all could have been. If only Musey had taken responsibility for properly backing up their own critical business data instead of blindly trusting Google Drive as some mythical, infallible cloud vault. But that false perception still persists today, despite so many stories showing even the biggest cloud platforms are vulnerable to catastrophe.

Sure, Google and the other cloud giants excel at resilience and redundancy when it comes to things like keeping services online. But they are not responsible for backing up your data; that onus lies with us as customers. Their SLAs contain no obligation to rescue data lost due to accidents or outages. Once deleted, consider it cosmic dust.

Musey is yet another poster child for this harsh reality. All $1.5 million dollars of their investment evaporated because they wrongly assumed data in Google Drive persisted indefinitely. What’s worse, their employees lost jobs and customers lost access to the promising app they had bought into. The catastrophic human impacts just compound this already painful cautionary tale even further.

So please, learn from Musey’s permanently fatal error and back up any important cloud data. Just make sure you have an air-gapped, independent copy you control. Your business literally depends on it!

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at S2|DATA, which helps companies manage their legacy data