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by kaizendad 2341 days ago
It's interesting -- they ID the actual cause of the problem up top, and then just zip right past it. The problem wasn't the hardware failure, or the lack of backups, it was that customers expected them to have backups.

Gandi goes into some detail on the recovery process and on ways to fix the issue in the future. But, apart from some hand-waving, they don't have any specifics about how they'll communicate expectations better with their customers in the future.

Imagine the counterfactual: Gandi's docs clearly communicate "this service has no backups, you can take a snapshot through this api, you're on your own." Of course customers with data loss would've complained, but, at the end of the day, the message from both Gandi and the community would've been "well, next time buy a service with backups?" Yet there's no explicit plan to improve documentation.

1 comments

People posted an excerpt of their manual, it explicitly called "snapshots" a "backup" and customers were surprised when they asked them to restore the snapshots and only now they explained the snapshots were not backups...
Absolutely! And yet no explicit planning for how they'd reword the manual in the future. That is the root cause of the real problem here -- not that there weren't backups, but that there weren't and the manual said that there were, and there's no plan to fix that!