History and stories
The data center fire that destroyed backups too
Some customers paid for backups. They found out after the fire that their backups were stored a few feet from the servers they were backing up.
1 min readStory
The short version
In March 2021, a fire destroyed a data center in Strasbourg. Customers who kept their backups in the same building lost both.
The story
OVHcloud is one of Europe’s largest hosting companies. In March 2021, a fire broke out at its data center campus in Strasbourg, France.
One building, SBG2, was destroyed. Another was partly damaged, and the rest of the site was shut down for a time. The company said all of its staff were safe.
Customer data and backups stored in the destroyed building were lost. For some customers, that meant losing their website or systems and their backups together, because both had been kept in the same place. Two customers later won compensation in court, and many others joined a group lawsuit.
Why it mattered
It showed what “the cloud” means in practice: real buildings that can burn. Customers who kept their backups in the same building as their systems lost both at once. Some later won compensation in court, but compensation does not bring back lost data.
The lesson today
A backup in the same building as the original protects against a deleted file or a failed disk. It does not protect against fire, flood or theft. The rule of thumb is to keep at least one copy somewhere else entirely, far enough away that the same event cannot reach both.
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