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> I mean, it's plausible, yet I find it hard to believe this solely drives demand 5 times. Because if it does then what, companies were not using cold storage backups before?

As someone in HPC: people never delete stuff. It can stick around forever, and so if more bits are generated, there are more bits that people don't want to delete "just in case". Depending on the organization, quota enforcement can be tighter or looser.

HSM is fairly popular in the HPC space for this reason:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_managemen...

Your newest/hottest bits are on NVMe, anything older than (e.g.) 3 months gets move to SSD, anything older than that to spinning rust HDDs, and then to tape.

There are several file systems where this happens in the background: the file still shows up at /path/for/stuff/foo.txt but the contents are shuffled about behind the scenes.

by Maxion2 hours ago|

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I suspect very very few companies have cold storage backups.

by otabdeveloper43 hours ago|

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Datacenters being blown up by drones and rockets in kinetic war is probably what drives demand, not "AI".

by lp923 hours ago|

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That's a small number of data center impacted and won't explain the 5x increase.

by bluGill3 hours ago|

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If it happened to "them" it could happen to us. You never know when the next war will be.

by wslh3 hours ago|

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> Because if it does then what, companies were not using cold storage backups before?

What I observed in the rising cybersecurity attacks happening around me:

(i) There are organizations thinking that they have [complete] backups and being aware they don't once the cyberattack if effective.

(ii) Even in organizations with complete backups they don't have a [good] process to recover them, and the operations suffered a lot.

Corollary: backups are, in general, not battle tested.

by rickdeckard3 hours ago|

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yep, in my observation the ratio of "having backup processes" to "having periodic disaster recovery drill" is somewhere in the area of 20:1.

Even within the same company. Every division has backup processes, only few actually try to recover the data once in a while...

by bluGill3 hours ago|

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At least they have a process. That gives you a chance. Often the process itself is good - you didn't test it but the vendors all did and so the data is there - it might be hard to restore, but it can be done by experts after the fact. The drill means you can recover in a "short time" instead of a "long time" (short time can range from minutes to days, while long time days to years)

by rickdeckard2 hours ago|

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yes and no.

I've ran drills with companies which concluded that the incremental backups couldn't be restored due to some data corruption issue (no readback test was ever done).

Luckily the company also did a full backup every 6 months, so a disaster would have only thrown them back 6 months at max! /s ;)

But yes, some issues were even more simple: I had a case where performing a restore required twice the storage size of the uncompressed data, and the company actually didn't have the infrastructure ready to do that in case of a disaster...

by bluGill2 hours ago|

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I'll bet that if it really was important you could pay someone (LLMs make this easier) to dig through the data byte by byte and get everything back despite the corruption. It would take years, and be very expensive, but typically there is enough redundancy to figure it out. Often you only really need a small subset of the data and can live without the rest.

Don't get me wrong, drills are important! You should do them. However backups without a restore drill better than no backups at all. Even if you only get the last full backup, the data from the last 6 months will be the easiest to recreate from scratch if you must.