Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss" (codinghorror.com)

And look, I agree with you in many ways - people need to take responsibility for their own backups, sure. But there is a division of responsibility. I mean, even if all my backups are 100% perfect, I am still trusting the hosting provider to, well, keep the power on. Pay the peering bill. Keep the server temp down. Not go bankrupt tomorrow.

You can just follow this chain as far as you want. Whether you like it or not, you're utterly dependent on the DNS root server admins. There is nothing at all you can do to prepare yourself for their failure. I bet you can't generate your own electricity or grow your own food, either.

All of civilisation is built on co-dependency and delegation of responsibility. It's the only way to do anything complex. At some point, you must delegate. Atwood should have checked - but he was paying his host to do it. That's like having an employee whose job it is to do backups. At some point, you just have to let go and trust them. Otherwise you can never really do anything; you're caught up in checking minutia; I can give examples of this kind of leadership failure until my keyboard breaks.

If my income is dependent on data, I make sure it gets backed up. If it's an active project, I use my backups to build my dev environments so it's fairly obvious when a backup has failed.

You are responsible for reading your statement and ensuring that all activity is valid, much in the same way that you are responsible for ensuring the viability of your recovery strategy.

Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups?

Anyone who wants to keep their data badly enough to pay (time, money) to do so. Coding Horror is a popular technology blog, and there's a significant cost in traffic and credibility when it fails.

Jeff Atwood lacked cognizance of the risks and made an incredibly poor technical and business decision in failing to validate correctness of his backups and implement a suitable recovery strategy.

As others have pointed out, it is your responsibility to check your bank statements to ensure that all is secure. But also, with banks you're dealing with money that is easily replaceable. If your card is compromised that money is gone but if it's their fault (or criminal) the bank will replace that money. Your data is not replaceable -- when it's gone, it's gone.

"Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups? How many of us check the backups? How many do check the backups checking process?"

True you do have to stop somewhere -- but there is due diligence and there's negligence. Making sure you are making offsite backups and periodically testing them is due diligence. On the otherhand, completely relying on someone else to backup your critical data is negligence. If your data is at all important to you, then you need to have a copy. But at some point you have to accept that you've done enough.

The rest of us will be quite happy to ensure that what we think is happening, actually is.

It's akin to a pedestrian getting hit by a car and then saying "I had the right of way". Yeah, maybe so, but now you're in the hospital breathing through a tube.

Those of us who checked for traffic before crossing the street are at home watching TV.

After all, their liability will almost certainly be less than the value of your data, in which case there are two reasons to keep extra copies, both business continuity reasons and direct economic ones.

But for backups, at least in this (early) era of manage hosting/cloud, its probably not too onerous to test your plans etc...

Sure, it should be the bank's responsibility to keep accounts safe. However, the fact that bank accounts are considered to be "safe" is in a large part due to systemic factors like the existence of the Fed (as lender of the last resort), FDIC, general political climate of "too big too fail", etc. As mentioned above, banks actually do go under a lot; it's just not as noticeable to the clients as before [the central banks], but the cost is there. (And there's a whole discourse there of whether it's a good idea for monetary system to have this kind of environment in the long run.)

In any case, nothing of the sort applies to the hosting providers (or even can be applied, as insuring unique data is not the same as insuring amounts of money) -- so assuming that keeping data there is as safe as keeping money in the bank is not a viable comparison.

Is his tweet. Sounds like blaming to me. I suppose it's a matter of personal taste but if you write about how you're serving your images off S3 and how everyone should be making redundant backups and then get bitten by the fact you somehow wrote about these things but didn't actually do them, you're not looking very hard at yourself.

My simple point is - if you're an advice-giver who's been shown to not follow his own advice on backups, don't compound it by being an advice giver who doesn't follow his own advice on humility.