News AWS accused of a ‘digital execution’ after it deleted 10 years of users' data without warning — software engineer details “complete digital annihil...

[ottonis]

What many people seem to confuse is the fact that cloud services do have redundancies on the hardware side of things: if a harddrive fails, the data are already mirrored on other drives, so loss of data is highly improbable,
That being said,- and this may come as a surprise to some - cloud data do not seem to be "waterproof" backed up when it comes to deletion by software. If you type in the shell "delete all data of accont XY and after that delete it from the recycle bin" then this data will be shredded forever, regardless of having been mirrored on numerous harddrives distributed across numerous places.

What kind of local backup the affected software developer did or did not actually have, is an entirely different topic, because all ciritical data should be regularly backed up locally as well.

The real story here is: even cloud data can get lost, and there might even be some crimical wrongdoing to cover up.

 

[zzarac]

The thought, the fallacy is, that there is a giant company with hundreds of employees, each of whom are responsible for and understand data protection 100x better than (I, humble consumer). That the bespoke company would delete the entire account including all backups, or that they would expose or allow the erroneous exposure of the entire bucket (with maybe the sensitive data of millions of users), would mean for sure that they are out of business, right? And so the risk management should be at a level beyond anything that I, personally, could ever maintain.

right?

Maybe I update the HDD i keep at in my ex-girlfriends basement after all?

They obviously do not understand data protection 100x better otherwise we wouldn't be talking here.

Right?

I am a freelance video editor and I have been backing up all my data for about 20 years. It is 99% video footage and it's at about 200 TB now.

All of it is backed up PROPERLY: three copies on two different types of media with one of them being off-site. Two copies are in RAID Z2 arrays and one is on LTO tapes.

I do not live in the States, but in a very much poor country (Croatia), and I earn about $50000 per year.
If I can afford proper backups, I fail to find a reason why one important and famous developer couldn't.

I repeat - it's laziness.

 

[KyaraM]

Keeping all your essential data in one place in the 'cloud', regardless of data security claims made by the company you choose, seems mad. Surely no company should put themselves in a position, where they are able to lose all their essential data, because of one mistake.

I got news for you... they aren't good.

 

[rgd1101]

probably the intern did it. or maybe their AI?

 

[qwertymac93]

Who knew AWS was running Replit AI on production, too? Fascinating.

 

[ottonis]

probably the intern did it. or maybe their AI?

If they indeed have an AI agent in charge of these tasks, then I wouldn't be surprised the least if the attempt to cover up was the AI agent's idea as well. The big question would then be: who is supervising the AI?

 

[bit_user]

If they indeed have an AI agent in charge of these tasks, then I wouldn't be surprised the least if the attempt to cover up was the AI agent's idea as well. The big question would then be: who is supervising the AI?

AI: the new scapegoat.

 

[GenericUser]

AI: the new scapegoat.

I've heard some worrying anecdotes where people have been leaning too hard on "AI" at their jobs and when it inevitably gets something wrong, they go "oh, well that's ChatGPTs fault then, not mine, and aren't held accountable even though the person using a tool like this for assistance is ultimately responsible for the work it produces.


The supervisors in these anecdotes don't really do anything about it because either they too are leaning on these tools too much for assistance, and don't want to have to be held to the same standard they'd be enforcing, or, worse, actually think it's acceptable to blame a tool instead of the person wielding it.

 

[Fox Tread33]

I don't find any of this surprising. There's an oldish saying: "There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer."

August 5, 2025 - This has been a favorite rant of my for years. Companies lure the naive with promises of "convenience", and secure storage. It has annoyed me no end that the Technorati, and Tech pundits, all bow before the great god "The Cloud", and tech that turns on their home lights etc. Not to mention the "convenience" of not carrying cash. "Eww.. dollar bills.. how disgusting and having to carry a wallet." Yeah.. that's all fine until bank ATM systems go down, and/or are hacked. It seems like a regular event in the U.K. Ask the people what couldn't get in or out of some buildings in Manhattan, New York City during a hurricane some years back. Because their keycards for opening doors didn't work because of an electricity outage. "Synicing " is another "daughter" of the devil. Synicing all of your devices and accounts, so that when one gets hacked, all of your important financial info and data is stolen. In the meantime, the hacked company more or less says.. "Opps.. our bad, here's how you can find out how criminals are using your data.. we of course will NOT pay for any reporting or reimburse you.. cause.. you know.. our shareholders would be upset. I store nothing in "The cloud", my computer systems are hardwired and don't talk to each other, and my data is stored on multiple external hard drives. You're VERY smart. Stay well.👍👍😊

 

[RedBaron616]

Software engineer with over a decade of experience doesn't use backups because he said AWS's features should have been his backup...Doesn't matter that AWS possibly did something shady, still his fault.

Furthermore, IF you are going to use the "cloud" like that, why wouldn't you use two different services with copies in two different locations/companies? A company which doesn't ask what can go wrong may not be around long.

 

[Daniel15]

If you primarily use AWS, why would you also store your backups with AWS? That's a bad idea. 3-2-1 applies to the cloud, too.

If you really want to go all-in on the cloud, the backups should be stored at a different cloud provider. A Hetzner Storage Box or storage VPS at another provider really isn't that expensive, and is perfect for encrypted backups with something like Borgbackup.