@nixCraft Don't trust anyone but your own hardware that you manage yourself. Anything else is asking for disaster.

Also, he totally lost any sympathy when he blamed "1995-era Java parameter parsing" for the failure.

@nixCraft Nowadays I would move to a more complex 33-22-11-00-Backup.

Keep at least 3 copies of the data
and regularly test 3 of them.

Use 2 different types of storage media
managed by than 2 fully independent software packages or service providers.

Keep at least 1 copy at a different location,
but also keep at least 1 of them at a location you own yourself.

Every service you haven't thoroughly checked yourself equals to 0 valid copies, also every copy that will automatically be overwritten without a forced retention (like RAID, most live-replication/geo-redundancy, …) is 0 copies.

@nixCraft

Wow! What. A. Story. A lot of comments about better backup strategies etc but this is not really that warning story but more one about getting algorithmically nuked, for no reason. And then no redress, no recovery, because of poor (hostile even) commercial/ business practices. 😬🤬

This especially resonated:
“ You might be thinking, “What are the odds they target me?” But that’s the wrong question. I thought the same thing—with my level of exposure and contributions, surely they could just write my name down and not bother me with stupid verification requests about whether I exist.

“But you’re not being targeted—you’re being algorithmically categorized. And if the algorithm decides you’re disposable, you’re gone.

“Doesn’t matter if you’re a verified open-source contributor. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been a customer for a decade. If you don’t fit the revenue model, if you don’t engage with support regularly, if your usage patterns look “suspicious” to a poorly trained ML model—you’re just another data point to be optimized away.”

So sorry! MENA AWS truly sucks. 😠

@nixCraft
I was on board until I read this bit:

"I was alone. Nobody understood the weight of losing a decade of work. But I had ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok to talk to. Every conversation revealed I wasn’t alone in being targeted by AWS—especially MENA."

Finding it hard to sympathise with someone who gets their reality from grok and chatgpt.

@nixCraft I have many sympathy for their struggles with a big cloud provider and the very poor treatements they got. When a digital service company or org acts as poorly it's so infuriating, giving the urges to just build something to never having anymore the need to rely on them.

Having this in mind, I'm not sure to get the idea to build a tool to migrate from one shitty provider to an other. I mean, Google, MS and especially Oracle (there are so many similar cases with Oracle cloud) aren't that better, when they delete your account, no appeals would help you (unless you are in EU with the DSA). The issue isn't proper to AWS only, but to this business style. I don't get why making the same stuff with an other company conducting business in the same style would lead to a different end.

Why not making tools to set up the same stuff at home, on a personnal server or any kind of infra, meaning this infra can be built anywere, instead ?

@nixCraft Ooof, learning the 3-2-1 backup rule the hard way I guess?

I've also lost 10+ years of data many years ago. But it was my own mess up. I tried to duplicate my backup but overwrite my data with the empty drive. A timeless classic.

@nixCraft

Nice post, however, moving to Google cloud is not better. Use NextCloud or self host it.

@nixCraft

Years ago when having the Benefits-of-Cloud argument someone threw at me the "Sysadmins just don't like having their pets taken away and replaced with cattle" line.

I thought about that a bit and gave the response: "I'll gladly give up the pets for the resources a herd of cattle bring. But on my ranch, not some spread I have no control over.

That's the point. If you do not have your IP on your own hardware then you don't actually have any IP worth a dime.

@nixCraft Yeah, even if you have the data, code, pipelines and everything for their vendor lock-in services and they decide to do this you are screwed.

Your story is just a noise and the only worry for them now is it will blow up somewhere publicly.