Robyn Peterson isn’t a computer newbie—after all, he’s in charge of technology for tech publisher Ziff Davis. So how did he lose his backup? Using a popular techie solution for online backup: FTP-ing his files to a web hosting provider. A perfectly reasonable, if somewhat tedious, solution. But as he found out, not such a secure option.
“We have been cracking down on people using our services for backing up files,” Peterson was told by the provider. The Terms of Service said their “servers are not intended as a data backup or archiving service.” Don’t check the fine print? Or don’t think it’ll be enforced? OK sometimes… but when you really need that backup, you don’t want the response Peterson got when he asked whether his deleted files were backed up: “backups go back a maximum of only two weeks, and no backups are guaranteed.”
