Yeah, that post was hard to read.

I'll concede that I'm hugely empathetic for people that suffer data loss. The pithy aphorism about there being two types of people -- those who haven't lost data, and those who do backups -- is doubly droll because only the second group really appreciates the phrase.

But it's surprising to find people with more than a decade in IT who don't appreciate the risks here.

The timeline reveals there were 13 days from when the first signs of trouble surfaced, to when the account was deleted. So a fortnight of very unsubtle reminders to do something AND a fortnight in which to act.

(I recently learned the phrase BATNA[0] and in modern <sic> IT where it's Turtles as a Service, all the way down, it's amazing how often this concept is applicable.)

Author seems very keen to blame his part-time sysadmin rather than his systems architect. I can understand the appeal of that blame distribution algorithm, but it's nonetheless misguided.

The phrasing:

> But here’s the dilemma they’ve created: What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup?

inverts the horse & cart. If you have a petabyte of data that's important, that you can't recreate from other sources, your concern is how to keep your data safe.

If you're paying someone to keep a copy, pay (at least one other) person to keep another copy. Even that isn't something I'd call safe though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...