[z3t4]

They did have backups, only problem backups was also on DO. Backing up petabyte of data even on a Gbit connection is slow, and also cost more then a pennies if you for example back it up on AWS. Linus tech tips have a video on youtube explaining the problem.

[PeterisP]

The original post literally mentions "all our data (500k rows)" i.e. a data amount so small they could probably back it up to their cellphone every five minutes.

[mort96]

It's not really a "backup" if it's just on the same server/data center though. Moving data from one drive to another in the same machine, or from one machine to another in the same building, provides fault tolerance should the main drive/machine die, that's about it.

That's true whether the computer(s) is your own or someone else's.

[z3t4]

It's all about threat model. And yes "our cloud provider accidentally deletes both our data and our backups" should be in the list.