I’m glad to see the media finally writing about an important issue that i have been warning my own clients about for a long time.
(Title is a little heavy on hype, but the warning is real)
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And then there was (or still is) the problem with “sticktion” in HDDs used for archives. Optical media seems to fade. Tapes crumble. It looks like paper tape or punched cards are the way to go!
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I recently answered a questionnaire for a client, who did not believe that we did not backup any data to tape.
The fact that the backups were in an AWS S3 bucket in a different geographic region to the primary systems was an alien concept to him.
“But where do you keep the backup tapes? Onsite or offsite”
“There are no backup tapes, it’s all backed up and transferred via encrypted transit mechanism to a different datacenter in a different country”
“OK, but where are the tapes kept then”
*Brick wall"
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On a serious note, this is also an issue that bothered me from an IT perspective - All major cloud providers are opaque about their storage infrastructure and architecture.
I think they share some of this info under NDA with big corporate clients, but consider it proprietary or MYOB (mind your own business) for regular consumers or small business.
The questions I have that would help understand how much to truly trust data in their cloud:
What level of data reliability is implemented in the physical storage? Mirrored or RAID arrays?
What level of ECC (error code and correction) is baseline for their storage systems? Single-bit detection, Single-bit correction with multi-bit detection, or ??
What geographic redundancy is provided at no additional cost?
Is there any “air-gap’d” (completely isolated from the Internet) backups automatically made of cloud data?
Is the storage system completely mono-culture or is this diversity to protect against software or firmware errors (or human error) propagating throughout the storage infrastructure when something goes wrong?
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Google does make white papers available for those that want to get into the weeds of their cloud storage. I read several of them some years ago and just found a couple by asking Google: does google offer white papers that explain how they store data
How google uses encryption to protect your data
Trusting your data with Google Workspace
From the little I’ve learned I don’t think Google uses raid or does backups. They are constantly checking the data and rebuilding/restoring as needed.
At one time they built their servers from standard PC parts. Today, as I understand, my data is broken into chunks and widely distributed across multiple servers and possibly data centers.
Some might find this interesting.
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Do they say anything about monoculture? A bug in their homegrown os/filesystem could potentially spread throughout their entire cloud infrastructure and destroy data, right?
Although cloud like be ok as one form of backup, I still follow 3-2-1 backup diversity so at best a cloud provider is only 1 copy and still need two more?
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I agree! My important data is synced to cloud, backed up to external SSD and NAS share, and backed up to Backblaze.
My internal SSD can die at anytime without risk to me losing important data. The way I see it, no storage media lasts forever, so you hedge your data storage “bet” by betting that every storage location of your data doesn’t fail at the same time.
Well, 5D optical storage on crystal claims to last forever, but that is hard to prove.
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Not that I can recall. I started using Google search around the time it started, and got my first Gmail account in 2004, so I’ve kept up with the company in the news.
I feel I may have a 30,000 ft view of Google’s infrastructure, but that idea may need a few more zero’s added for accuracy. What I do is know is Google has over 70 datacenters in countries around that world and it is continuing to grow. So a lot of people and businesses must feel comfortable using them.
Most importantly, me. 
+1
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Yes, it would take a very long time. 
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IMHO, A good number of CIO and CSO’s (chief security officers) know less then they claim and care less than they should.
e.g. Remember the panic when Crowdstrike took down major corporations around the world? Few knew the full implications of choosing and relying on that vendor without a complete understanding of the workflow used to automatically update millions of PC’s.
Maybe OT or TMI, but in some IT circles I’ve heard that the only reason companies hire a CSO and pay them “the big bucks” is that the CSO is expected to take the fall when, not if, a security lapse happens and the salary is a lot cheaper than actually investing in all the upgrades and processes needed to more fully protect the corporation?
To be fair, as a CISO you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
By the same adage that no-one got fired for buying IBM, No CISO is going to be seen as negligent if one of the big big big tech company has a breach or significant downtime.
There is no way to get significant information about how the biggest companies work, no-one but the largest organisations can afford to implement in a multi cloud way, and it’s far too expensive and risky to either create your own infrastructure or use anyone but the largest providers.
Cost plays as much of a factor as anything else on what CISOs are judged on.
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I agree. When I got my first I.T. job in the early 90’s there was a saying , “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. In other words, purchasing an established name brand gave you job protection if something went wrong. Today the big dogs in the cloud business are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Before I retired my company decided to move from an on premise email server to Google or Microsoft. Management was interested in cost and features, they never questioned which was the most reliable. If they had asked I would have given them the names of a few well known companies that were customers of each company. That’s the best I had to offer.
Sometimes we have to make important decisions with incomplete information.
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To expand on the money-based decision topic
I had an employer shut down an entire office to save money. Within a week or two, management discovered that they had inadvertently fired personnel who managed key systems, and struggled to cancel the closure and claw back employees from the site who had already left.
This happened to me. I was given a termination notice and , during my exit interview the interviewer realized that what I did had nothing to do with my job title, and ask me if I would accept a job offer for a position that they would create for me in order to keep me. lol.
Another one that stands out was another company that replaced a monitoring system that had been working for over a decade. Before they even finished migrating to the new system, they changed course again. The next year…you got it, changed monitoring systems again, The year after that, you guessed it again. New system coming.
My only explanation for this is either someone is reading tech news and makes decisions based on what the current best monitoring system is, or they are chasing the lowest cost enterprise monitoring system and haven’t found one that was actually cheaper than where they were in the beginning. I get that you often have to try something to know if it’s better than what you have , but maybe do a trial run before jumping ship!
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Some executives or managers are so insecure they feel they are only productive and accomplishing something if they make big changes.
It is worse in marketing (my field for many years), every new VP immediately wants to change the logo and the ad campaigns, or both.
Much harder to resist as based on “touchy feely” expertise they claim to have or if a big company, they hire consultants and focus groups to justify their pre-determined opinions presented as objective conclusions.
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Re: 5D Optical storage on crystal: This is still a “future” thing.
I am curious about any user’s experience with M-Disk. Is has been around for a while.It is marketed as being safe storage for 100 + years. And yet in discussions on podcasts and the like, I hear little about this technology and its use in backup strategies. Are people unhappy with it? Are people just reluctant to try something new? Are people just concerned about marketing hype? On the face of it, it would seem a reasonable approach to saving critical personal stuff to supplement off-site storage.
You probably don’t hear about it because:
- Drives which wrote to the media were very expensive leading to very limited adoption, especially for personal use
- If I recall correctly, write speeds were very slow
- there was no way for people to validate the claims of longevity, especially with the limitations of various other optical media,
- the amount of storage space per disc was quickly superseded. Back in 2010 our corporate backups exceeded 100GB
- and for businesses who typically only need retain backup data for up to a couple of years on backup media, tapes such as LTO were cheaper per use due to their reusability.
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IMO, one problem with all backup media is the device we use. I was backing up to LTO 8 tape (12TB) when I retired.
As I recall new LTO drives used to write to the current version, say version 8, and one version older (v7), and read from two versions older (v6). As of 2025 LTO tape drives are not required to have any backward compatibility. LTO tape can last for 30+ years, but where would someone find an LTO 8 tape drive in 2050 to recover the data?
As far as I’m concerned all my photos and movies are stored on Google Drive and iCloud. The copies on my Mac, local drives, and Backblaze B2 are backups.
My oldest photograph is one of my mother being held by my grandmother outside their home. Based on her size, and the height of the corn growing in the background, I estimate the photo was taken in June 1923. The physical photo is still in good condition.
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Currently Verbatim M DISC sells for $12.00 per disk with each storing 100GB. (2.5 TB for $300.00) This would seem ample for personal use. I guess it takes about an hour to burn one disk which is a “long” time in the computer world.
The iCloud/Google/AWS type of solution is easy, but is a “subscription” cost model which many profess to hate.