WHAT!? How the heck did you get that conclusion from this story? These are literally your people, who backed up to a local device and essentially chose their own local NAS rather then the cloud. Which unfortunately for them came from a company with bad support that dropped it 6 years ago and likely did a shitty job even before that. But not everyone can be a tech person! Even tech people can't be that knowledgeable about more than a fraction of information technology, the field is crazy vast [0].
The failure modes here are exactly why "cloud" makes so much sense for so many. Keeping stuff up to date, or migrating if the company drops it (even noticing that support has stopped). Securing access. Verifying integrity. Amortizing the cost of different media cold storage fallbacks with things like tape robot facilities. And on and on. You wanna opine a bit on the relative probability that Amazon, Apple, Backblaze, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, rsync.net, or a host of others just "at any moment going dark, for any reason" vs Western fucking Digital My Dropped-in-2015-Book dying? Think carefully.
I mean shit, I actually have a custom Epyc-based TrueNAS Core (not FreeNAS anymore! gotta keep up!) system with tens of terabytes as my main backing store, and replication to a remote site, with more usage of network segmentation, wireguard, ZFS user privileges so compromise of the replication credentials can't delete old stuff, then I'd expect nearly anyone to have any idea about. I still have it going to Backblaze B2 as well, and I pay to have them hang onto it for a year rather then 30 days. And the only reason I can swing it all is that I can amortize a lot of it professionally, get other usage from it, and draw upon a bunch of both knowledge and metaknowledge that my particular life path happens to have granted me.
For 99% of the people in my life "turn on iCloud/Backblaze/whatever" is the right advice. Backups are very risky without heavy automation and regular attention on top.
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0: One thing working at various levels has given me a deep appreciation for is what broad shoulders I stand upon, many layers deep, and how valuable and deep the knowledge of so many other tradespeople I interact with in life is. The mechanics, electricians, plumbers, general contractors, structural engineers, medical folks, researchers and so on I work with or have worked with all possess skills and knowledge that I never will. That's why we're social animals. I've traded on my skills helping someone improve their network for a hand with skilled carpentry or electrical work or the like. I don't see any shame in that.
They hooked the backup to the internet. Not a good idea. Nothing connected to the internet is secure, especially since nothing comes with physical write-enable switches.
Incredibly shallow and dangerously bad hot take. I think you have a very poor understanding of what "security" is, nor the concept of backups in general which necessarily (like security) have a very strong human factors requirement. A backup which is too much of a PITA and requires nearly any level of manual effort simply isn't going to get used much or maintained well at all by the vast majority of the population. Tools and systems exist to serve humanity, not the other way around, and when a system fails badly for many it's not humanity that must all change, it's a shitty system.
Fact: if these people had been running to a decent cloud service, they'd probably still have their data. Really "don't connect backup to the internet" is like, fractally stupid. The more one digs the more stupid angles turn up recursively similar to higher level stupid. "Don't connect backup to the internet" means what to you? What about the computer itself making the backup? If that is connected it could get infected as well, now what? Everyone is just supposed to give up on all networks entirely because "hurr durr nothing on a network is secure"? Which is wrong anyway since security an economic equation, not some ethereal absolute. I hope you never give this advice to anyone IRL.
Consider that I worked on the 757 stabilizer trim gearbox. The idea is no matter what fails, the airplane lands safely. I've been trained to think that way.
Consider also that I've worked with computers for 45 years. I've seen about every failure you can think of, including fires and floods, explosions and earthquakes, viruses and phishing.
The most unreliable, by far, part of computing is the internet.
WHAT!? How the heck did you get that conclusion from this story? These are literally your people, who backed up to a local device and essentially chose their own local NAS rather then the cloud. Which unfortunately for them came from a company with bad support that dropped it 6 years ago and likely did a shitty job even before that. But not everyone can be a tech person! Even tech people can't be that knowledgeable about more than a fraction of information technology, the field is crazy vast [0].
The failure modes here are exactly why "cloud" makes so much sense for so many. Keeping stuff up to date, or migrating if the company drops it (even noticing that support has stopped). Securing access. Verifying integrity. Amortizing the cost of different media cold storage fallbacks with things like tape robot facilities. And on and on. You wanna opine a bit on the relative probability that Amazon, Apple, Backblaze, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, rsync.net, or a host of others just "at any moment going dark, for any reason" vs Western fucking Digital My Dropped-in-2015-Book dying? Think carefully.
I mean shit, I actually have a custom Epyc-based TrueNAS Core (not FreeNAS anymore! gotta keep up!) system with tens of terabytes as my main backing store, and replication to a remote site, with more usage of network segmentation, wireguard, ZFS user privileges so compromise of the replication credentials can't delete old stuff, then I'd expect nearly anyone to have any idea about. I still have it going to Backblaze B2 as well, and I pay to have them hang onto it for a year rather then 30 days. And the only reason I can swing it all is that I can amortize a lot of it professionally, get other usage from it, and draw upon a bunch of both knowledge and metaknowledge that my particular life path happens to have granted me.
For 99% of the people in my life "turn on iCloud/Backblaze/whatever" is the right advice. Backups are very risky without heavy automation and regular attention on top.
----
0: One thing working at various levels has given me a deep appreciation for is what broad shoulders I stand upon, many layers deep, and how valuable and deep the knowledge of so many other tradespeople I interact with in life is. The mechanics, electricians, plumbers, general contractors, structural engineers, medical folks, researchers and so on I work with or have worked with all possess skills and knowledge that I never will. That's why we're social animals. I've traded on my skills helping someone improve their network for a hand with skilled carpentry or electrical work or the like. I don't see any shame in that.