What kills me about this is that 50 TB isn't actually that much data, and they could have pretty easily had a first-party, offline backup of this. You can buy a 16 TB hard disk for <$700 on Newegg (even with the storage price increases), and any halfway-decent IT person could have set up their own storage backup server with a ZFS pool on commodity hardware within a day or two. That's probably, all in, probably under <$3k in hardware and a bit of labor to have a local redundant backup (of cold, rarely accessed media) for everything before they uploaded it to the cloud that would have de-risked this whole situation enormously.
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What kills me about this is that 50 TB isn't actually that much data, and they could have pretty easily had a first-party, offline backup of this. You can buy a 16 TB hard disk for <$700 on Newegg (even with the storage price increases), and any halfway-decent IT person could have set up their own storage backup server with a ZFS pool on commodity hardware within a day or two. That's probably, all in, probably under <$3k in hardware and a bit of labor to have a local redundant backup (of cold, rarely accessed media) for everything before they uploaded it to the cloud that would have de-risked this whole situation enormously.