This morning, LowEndTalk member @ralf shared news of an AWS tragedy.  The title of the thread is “Do your own backups (AWS deleted person’s 10-year account and all data without warning)”.

Now, before I even opened the thread, I knew what the community’s reaction would be: do your own offsite backups.  This is practically the sacred creed of the LowEnd world.

Why LowEnders Safeguard Their Data Better Than Anyone Else

Some people and businesses will say “Amazon is a huge provider.  The biggest businesses in the world run on AWS.  My data is safe there.”  Of course, substitute Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc. for Amazon.

But a LowEnder is used to dealing with somewhat more fragile providers.  They often are hosting their information with companies that are small operations, if not outright one-man bands.  Everyone in the community has had experience (or at least witnessed) providers who are great but suddenly run into an issue, which might be:

• financial problems that the provider manages to cover up until suddenly there’s an eviction notice tacked on the datacenter door
• sketchy infrastructure that runs great until it doesn’t
• all the technical brains in the head of one guy who decides to go do something else
• a provider makes a mistake with your account or you get into some kind of dispute with them

…or any other reason.  The point is that LowEnders are hosting on enterprise-grade fabric, so they expect problems….and prepare for them.

I’ve talked with a lot of LowEnders who are proud of the fact that if one of their nodes vanishes, they can have its replacement stood up quickly with another host.  Sometimes this is even already setup with automation (e.g., Ansible).  Sure, there are people who seem to need to learn the lesson every time a provider fails, but no one is more cognizant of the dangers of a provider screwing something up than a community that deals with less-than-enterprise-grade providers.

What Happened Here?

The article referenced by @ralf is an interesting read.  It begins with a summary:

On July 23, 2025, AWS deleted my 10-year-old account and every byte of data I had stored with them. No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation.

This is the story of a catastrophic internal mistake at AWS MENA, a 20-day support nightmare where I couldn’t get a straight answer to “Does my data still exist?”, and what it reveals about trusting cloud providers with your data.

There’s a timeline you can read through, but essentially someone at Amazon made a catastrophic mistake, and the author has a pretty good lead on what it was.  Then Amazon provided abysmal customer support, as is typical with a lot of large tech companies these days.  These firms seem to operate on the principal that they’ll engineer everything so perfectly that there will be no need for customer support.  Then when something breaks, getting hold of a human – much less one with actual power to help – is nigh impossible.

The Lesson

There’s and old and famous quote about backups: “There are two types of people: those who have lost data, and those who will.”

That first type is often caused by putting all your eggs in one basket.  If you don’t want to be the second type,

• Don’t keep backups on the same server where your data lives.
• Don’t keep backups with the same provider who has your primary data.
• Make sure your backups work and you’ve tested a recovery scenario.

In other words, trust nothing and no one.  Some providers offer backups, and that’s great.  It’s sure a lot faster to get a VPS or shared hosting account back if the provider has this service.  But you shouldn’t entirely trust it.  At the end of the day, the only one who can secure your data is you.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.