iCloud: the backup that loses your data

[NiHaoMike]

https://twitter.com/everyplace/status/1405634844965720064

Apple did what they do: delete abandoned data. But their version of abandoned is not mine. A service with “backup” in the title implies a backup. My expectation as a customer is that if I pay for my data to be stored, it should be stored?

[SiliconWizard]

Damn.

That's why I absolutely NEVER want to have to trust a third party to store my data safely.

[TimFox]

I believe that Western Digital used to advertise a series of RAID hard drives as a “personal cloud” storage/backup device.

[newbrain]

I believe that Western Digital used to advertise a series of RAID hard drives as a “personal cloud” storage/backup device.

  I see what you did there!

[SiliconWizard]

I believe that Western Digital used to advertise a series of RAID hard drives as a “personal cloud” storage/backup device.

  I see what you did there!

 

[floobydust]

I thank Apple iCloud for giving the Internet all the nude pics of Hollywood actresses, the sync feature apparently made it seamless.

WD MyBook NAS devices are being remotely wiped clean worldwide
Known back in 2018:
"Western Digital WD My Book Live and WD My Book Live Duo (all versions) have a root Remote Command Execution bug via shell metacharacters in the /api/1.0/rest/language_configuration language parameter. It can be triggered by anyone who knows the IP address of the affected device, as exploited in the wild in June 2021 for factory reset commands".
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-18472#vulnCurrentDescriptionTitle


For everyone thinking their Synology NAS is any better: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?form_type=Basic&results_type=overview&query=synology&search_type=all

The attacker IP addresses this week were from beijing, cypress etc. I hope it's not part of the commie 100 year celebrations.

[PlainName]

A service with “backup” in the title implies a backup.

Yep. And a service with "archive" in the title implies archived data. The two are not the same.

A mistake made when not using the cloud too, FWIW.

[Ranayna]

Oooh yes. The distinction between "backup" and "archive" is important.
Backups generally are short lived, whereas archives can sometimes last decades.

The company where i worked on backups thought that an archive would not be required. We backup on tape anyway, so why not keep one full set every half year for "forever"... 
There where so many damn dependencies in the system...

To start with, obviously, tape drive generations. LTO could, back then, read two generations back. But when the first generation of tape libraries was due to be replaced, we went with LTO-4. The "archived" backups where on LTO-1... So we had to keep the old tapelibrary in storage.
But that was not all. At some point we got a big SAN storage. That came with new backup software that was incompatible with the old backup format. Yay, we now also keep the old server alive  The hardware of course, since the old tapelibrary is connected via SCSI.
But even *that* was not all yet. That new backup software used a special protocol to backup the data, called NDMP. That is neat and more importantly, with a capacity nearing the Petabyte range, fast. But that protocol introduced yet another dependency: Restores are only possible on a compatible storage. Guess what: a couple of years later we got a new storage, with incompatible NDMP...

And that is not yet touching stuff like integrity testing, or even compatibility of data formats.

A proper archive is *hard* and expensive. A backup with a defined data retention policy is almost trivial compared to that. Apples 180 days are, in my opninion, on the long side for backup retention times.
I have not used the iCloud yet. Does Apple notify the users about imminent retention expiry?

[m98]

If one comes to think of it, why would you keep unsynced content on a smartphone or tablet? Services like iCloud backup clearly are for convenience so you don't have to manually set up a new device, or can conveniently wipe it to send it in for repair. Such backups really shouldn't be used as data storage.