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Thought for the day...
- Thread starter Wendy
- Start date
It's never a good idea to poke a bear. Waking it up is even worse:
Keep your own backups of important data. This is a PBS broadcaster, not PBS themselves.
https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...sts-archival-materials-to-ensure-preservation
PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation
It seems that the safest legal way to resolve this issue is for Nine PBS to get a court order requiring Iron Mountain to turn over its data. But the channel must act quickly to ensure that its data, which Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman said to Current represented "70 years of our organization’s history," stays safe.
It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data. And at least there's still a chance — it's not like the fire that the South Korean government experienced last year, which saw 858TB of data go up in smoke.
https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...sts-archival-materials-to-ensure-preservation
PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation
It seems that the safest legal way to resolve this issue is for Nine PBS to get a court order requiring Iron Mountain to turn over its data. But the channel must act quickly to ensure that its data, which Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman said to Current represented "70 years of our organization’s history," stays safe.
It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data. And at least there's still a chance — it's not like the fire that the South Korean government experienced last year, which saw 858TB of data go up in smoke.
Ha. 50TB of local storage is dirt cheap by comparison!
When the Academy was putting everything onto SharePoint, one of the questions I raised was whether it was a good idea to put all the eggs in one basket and we needed to allow for the possibility that, for some reason, SharePoint became no longer available and there was no way to access any data behind it. I was told that this wasn't a concern. That there was no way that SharePoint would ever go away. My first thought was that there was a time when people probably thought the same thing about MySpace or any of dozens of other widely-used entities that went the way of the dodo bird (in part or in whole). But, that view wasn't deemed worthwhile because it didn't support what the powers-that-be had already decided.
Even worse: it is elementary today to schedule daily backups across multiple devices onto multiple backup servers (local and offsite). There's almost no excuse for depending on third parties for backups.
Perhaps they thought a part-time IT guy -- and a bit of cheap hardware -- was too expensive. They learned.
Their legal expenses are going to far outweigh any costs they might have incurred -- aside from the loss of the actual data.
Oh, as far as I know nothing bad has happened. I don't know if they are still using it, either. That was one of the other concerns I raised -- to what degree were they getting trapped in a particular ecosystem that was make it difficult or effectively impossible to choose to migrate to another platform ten years from now? I got a similar reaction that basically assumed that there would never be any need to change and they could cross that bridge when they got there. Again, the powers-that-be had already decided that they were going to jump on the SharePoint bandwagon and everyone else just had to deal with it.
What might be "elementary" for you is far from elementary for the vast majority of people and organization. How many people schedule daily backups across multiple devices onto multiple backup servers (local and offsite) for their interaction with most things. Do you do this for the posts you make on AAC? I certainly don't -- and it's not because I've made the conscious decision to accept the risk of loss of my tens of thousands of posts if AAC shuts down tomorrow. Plus, even if I did, most of that content is meaningless without the context of the hundreds of thousands of posts by other members that surround it, and there is no practical way for me or the vast majority of other members to preserve that content. So we rely on AAC to maintain and safeguard that data and on AAC to remain accessible for as long as we want to have access to it. It's even worse with something like SharePoint, since you aren't preparing independent data files and then putting them into SharePoint (for the most part). You are using SharePoint directly to take advantage of its highly integrated and powerful features. It is difficult to back up everything that is needed to have a true backup and, even if you did, you would lose much of the functionality because SharePoint isn't just the raw data itself, but the relationships and workflows and integrations that tie it all together and that would have to be rebuilt in order for the data to have the necessary contexts to be meaningful.
For better or worse, organizations and individuals turn to services like SharePoint precisely because they either don't want to deal with the administrative burden, or they don't know how or that it is even something that needs to be considered. How many people that are "content creators" or "influencers" in social media back up everything they do? I would be surprised if it's even 1%. And how reasonable is it to expect some 60-year old grandmother selling hand-made doilies on some online marketplace to keep daily backups across multiple devices onto multiple backup servers (local and offsite) of all of the information that she is paying the marketplace operator to produce and maintain?
Or... maybe they are crying because they do!
... it definitely helps them breathe!
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