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Comment by lukeschlather | Hacker News Reader

I think there's going to be a big watershed moment. One of the big cloud service providers is going to have a major data loss event. (Probably Google or Facebook, but who knows, Microsoft or Amazon or a number of others are equally vulnerable.) At that point, it will be interesting to see how far into the rabbit hole we've gone and how we react to seeing so much of our info vanish.

I'll be hanging on to my local hard drive tooth and nail. (Backing up to S3 or something mind you, but make no mistake my local disk is the master copy.)

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Google's been indexing the web and Amazon executing bazillions of legally binding sales without a "major data loss event" for 13 years now. I don't think that's really likely. At that scale, backups aren't really a .serious problem, as you have to have redundancy in the system for reliability reasons anyway.

A "major privacy event" seems quite likely though.

> Google's been indexing the web and Amazon executing bazillions of legally binding sales without a "major data loss event" for 13 years now. I don't think that's really likely. At that scale, backups aren't really a .serious problem, as you have to have redundancy in the system for reliability reasons anyway.

How do you know that there hasn't been a major data loss event for Google? Would you be able to tell the difference if, say, a quarter of their data were gone?

(I agree that it would be more visible if Amazon had a major data loss, but the fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean it didn't. In fact, can you name a major data loss of which you do know? (I can't, but that may just be because I don't follow these things.) Surely one can't conclude from the fact that there are few well publicised examples that businesses do not suffer such losses.)

It's happened before, at least once very early on:

  Google had taken ill.
  
  The problem was the index storing the contents of the web 
  in Google's servers. For a couple of months in early 2000, 
  it wasn't updating at all. Millions of documents created 
  during that period weren't being being collected. As far as 
  the Google search engine was concerned, they didn't exist.

http://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA41...

It's a nit, but this wasn't a "data loss" event. It was a bug that prevented the storing of the data in the first place. Backup strategies (either cloud-managed or "hanging on to your local hard drive" as lukeschlather posits) would not have helped.

I know of at least one incident at Google in the early part of the last decade where the entire crawl got deleted (or otherwise corrupted), meaning results didn't get updated for an extra six weeks or so.

>A "major privacy event" seems quite likely though.

The breakdown that is going to happen when Facebook and/or Gmail's database gets dumped and uploaded to The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks is going to be mind-blowingly tremendous.

On top of that, I wouldn't expect any slowdown after "a major privacy event". I fully believe that we are in a world where very few organizational secrets can be kept. Virtually no one, including major corporations and governments, has a correct concept of what is necessary to protect digital data. In the early days of the war, when everyone is still able to use the internet, the intelligence leakage is just going to be astonishing.

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