The importance of disaster recovery - OVH Fire

Tekno Venus · Mar 13, 2021

The recent fire at one of OVH's data centres really highlights the importance of not just having a back up of data, but actually ensuring the backup is stored somewhere completely different:

OVH fire update: four halls of SBG1 destroyed, as well as all of SBG2

As well as destroying the whole of the SBG2 data center, the fire destroyed four rooms out of 12 in the adjacent SBG1 data center. Power to all four data centers on the site is off, and the UPS at SBG3 has been shut down according to OVH's status page for the incident. OVHcloud hopes to bring power back to SBG1 and SBG4 on Monday March 15, and it will take until Friday March 19 to restore the UPS at SBG3.

No cause has yet been announced for the fire, which destroyed the SBG2 building in six hours on Wednesday morning before it was extinguished by a team of more than 100 international firefighters working with a pump boat on the Rhine.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1369478732247932929

Official updates: Article not found

Their entire SBG2 data centre is completely destroyed - so even users who thought they were safe by backing up to another sever in the same datacentre have still lost everything.

As an aside, we practice what I preach here at Sysnative - our backups are stored in an independent datacentre ran by a completely different company on the opposite side of the country!

britechguy · Mar 13, 2021

Not that I don't agree with everything said above, but it's far more applicable to large organizations than individual residential users or "mom and pop" businesses. Particularly if they're "cloud storage averse," whether or not that's rational.

The above being said, even if you have to store your backup media in the same location, at the very least put it in a fireproof vault. Ideally, if you're dealing with a situation where you have a place of business (or other work location) separate from your home, have two different backup drives that you alternate between backups, taken at whatever frequency is needed, and take them elsewhere when you leave for the day for storage until the next backup is taken.

For my machines at home I have "even and odd month" backup drives, and between backups they're stored in a fireproof safe, as I have no convenient consistently visited "away from home" location in which I could store them. If I did, at the very least, the latest drive to be backed up to would go there and the one for the next one to be taken returned to the house with me.

I'd imagine that any large organization with mission critical data would have an off-premise backup, probably along with an on-premise backup as in most cases it's far quicker to access the on-premise one under normal circumstances where you need it.

A Guy · Mar 14, 2021

I keep one backup on Onedrive...hopefully never need it

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The importance of disaster recovery - OVH Fire

Tekno Venus

Senior Administrator, Developer

britechguy

Well-known member

A Guy

Righteous Dude