I knew someone who several years ago wrote a book … on his laptop … for a year … and never backed it up or retained a print copy. You can probably guess what happened next.
Almost as bad are these folks who relied on a cloud-based company to store backups of episodes of the children’s show they produced. One malicious employee later, and (per the Register),
CyberLynk had fired an employee called Michael Scott Jewson and, according to a Honolulu courthouse news report, one month after being given the boot, Jewson accessed CyberLynk servers and wiped out 304GB of data, including 14 Zodiac Island episodes, a full season of the show.
The Zodiac Island producers were based in Hawaii, and Cyberlynk in Wisconsin. A cloud-based service is probably a very good solution for a television production team to share assets among disperse groups all working on a television show, but as a primary backup as well? Seriously?
Especially considering the small size of the dataset involved. Local backup of 304gb would have been dirt cheap. Having a cloud-based backup for convenience or as an alternative in case of a local disaster is a good idea, but I can’t see ever giving up local backups entirely unless the dataset is too large to do so meaningfully (if they were dealing with 100s of terabytes, then maybe I’d understand why they weren’t doing local backups as well, but 304gb…puhleeze).