Cloud Service Shenanigans
A month or two ago a friend of mine ran a silly little event with a bunch of people where we each drank about six or seven shots of alcohol, and then tried to deliver a presentation using slides we had never seen before, which one of the other attendees had made beforehand.
At the time I had just been dealing with a major outage of my main server, which contained a lot of quite important data that wasn’t properly backed up anywhere (I did have a backup system, but I turned it off in 2022 when I ran out of storage, and then forgot to actually deal with the problem, thanks ADHD)1.
Anyway, I had fun making this silly little presentation, and I figure you might have fun reading it:
Original .odp presentation (no JS required)
I did end up getting the data back, thanks to my insane luck in getting in contact with Greg. Had I not been so lucky, all the data would be gone, without even an explanation. The moral of the presentation isn’t really about how great Greg is, though. Greg’s not even their real name.
What is the moral? Idk, there’s a lot more to say about economies and diseconomies of scale, about the ossification of corporate structures into monstrosities where “computer says no” is a valid response; where even the people at the top can’t apply discretion to bend their self-imposed rules even when they obviously should. But I’ll leave that for another post.
For now, the moral is: check your backups! Mine are solid now, don’t worry ^w^
In fairness, the threat model of “Oracle locks you out of your server without giving you any warning whatsoever” had not even entered my mind. I assumed that a vaguely reputable company would at least give a warning first…↩︎
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