That's extraordinary .. but it does drive home the distinction between "backup" and "online second copy of your data". Proper backups should be offline when not in use.
> Proper backups should be offline when not in use.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I'd say that backups on the same service as the data aren't a good idea. It would smart of use a different cloud provider for the backups and (depending on the size of the operation), even a disk sitting in someone's house somewhere, just in case.
That's why I have a Mini on the bookshelf that SSH's into an EC2 instance (IP restricted) during a 1 hour window each night when the router is set to open and copies that day's PGP'd backups over. Then it goes back to sleep to wake on schedule the following night. Not the same as a tape in a vault, but it's my last resort.
