You're backing up for the wrong disaster (jitbit.com)

Sounds legit. This goes double on the cloud. In my early days of using AWS, it was so easy to create and destroy EC2s, I created some EC2s for testing - then terminated them... then realized I terminated the wrong ones.

Whoops

human error is here. creating a backup and forgetting the password for example or mistyping it

At one place I remember that we had the usual scheduled backups for our MySQL databases. We also wanted a quicker way to bring systems back with less data loss, so we also had a lagged replica that purposely applied changes delayed by I think it was about 4 hours. The other handy thing was that swapping a replica for the write leader was a common operation that we did whenever we upgraded hardware or software versions so it was a well exercised procedure.

W. Curtis Preston, author of the O'Reilly book "Backup and Recovery" has said:

> Backups are useless. Restores are priceless.

I also like:

> The state of a backup is unknown and unknowable, until such time as it has been tested with a restore.

so true, had a zfs nas in 2009 with raidz, snaphots, everything, yet I did delete personnal stuff by mistake.