Protected by Scarecrow

Loading Dashboard....

Ransomware? Pfft.

You know, I could be wrong about a lot of things. But I’m guessing most of us, as I type this morning, are currently inhabiting the year 2025?

Sure, there are outliers. Babies being born and such. But I think it’s mostly true. Please make a note of the year! There will be a quiz later.

Chances are good you already know where I’m going here. I’m sorry to be so obvious. But the other day I was listening to a podcast about security and there was much discussion of ransomware. School districts! Banks! All sorts of systems; there was plenty of scare talk. Much about who must be notified, the timing of said notifications, and different laws in different jurisdictions vs. what people apparently actually do.

Bear with me for a bit, if you will. That same day, I had had a hard drive failure. There was a database I really didn’t want to lose on that drive! So I started wondering about my options. Only…there weren’t any. Because:

1. The drive was already “mirrored”, meaning all content was on another drive anyway.
2. That database uses “write-ahead” logs, saving content to…a separate pair of mirrored drives. So I could actually lose three out of four drives on that machine and my data would be fine.
3. Also, this was all replicated to multiple cloud providers, and in the case of this particular database there’s also a synced copy in my office.
4. I also have daily backups of that database via Scarecrow, and the content doesn’t actually change a whole lot anyway.
5. The damn drive was in a datacenter thousands of miles from me. All I could really do was open a support ticket.

I’m going to give a shout out to Hetzner here. They have thoroughly and repeatedly impressed me with their technical support. In this case, it was something like 15 minutes before they were doing things to my server. FWIW swapping out a drive, if I were doing it myself, is only about a 10-minute job, and half of that is asking my wife where I left the itty bitty screwdrivers. But they were fast. (Though the support email telling me they had finished arrived several hours later; I can live with that.)

And…hmm. Ransomware? Does nobody have independent off-site backups? All this drama about who gets involved, and consultants who specialize in handling incidents, plenty of legal infrastructure, and for what?

I realize I’m a curmudgeon, and have been for decades now (I started early!). But, really, the whole thing is absurd.

Okay, it’s time: what year is it, again?

Side note: I personally hate black-box backup systems, which is nearly all of them; I want to see my data. So we built a system that’s as open as we could make it. Please look at your backups yourself, and verify they’re actually working.

Carry on.