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are your backups too large to be elsewhere completely? i'm working on a site on appengine, and although i can't back up all data, i can copy the critical stuff (the user accounts) to servers elsewhere.

[i realise this is a little off-topic, but what do other app-engine users do?]

[edit: wasn't being critical, just trying to understand what others do and why]

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They're not mission critical failures, but that's not the point to me - I pay a monthly fee to have those snapshots there, and they just carved holes in them. Disappointing to say the least, even though it's not actually taken down any of our instances.

I’m glad to hear that you didn’t lose anything critical. But snapshotting EBS volumes are not backing them up. If, by definition, it’s stored using the same service, and therefore susceptible to all the same catastrophes that might befall the service, then it’s not a back up. I always set up a local read slave of the database server which has hot-swappable hard drives that get rotated out of a safe deposit box or fireproof safe. The only way I can properly trust that things are being backed up properly are to do it myself.

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