T
Tom
Guest
Why I Back Up to Three Cloud Providers (And You Should Too)
The 3 AM disaster that changed everything: The decade-old AWS account suspended overnight. Ten years of workβgone. His mistake? Trusting a single provider.
The Problem with Single-Provider Strategies
Even reliable cloud giants fail through non-technical issues:
Account suspensions from billing disputes
Policy violations triggering automated locks
Regional outages affecting entire ecosystems
When your primary provider, backups, and monitoring all exist in one place, you're betting everything on a single point of failure.
My Four-Pillar Defense Strategy
1. Heartbeat Monitoring
bash
Backup validation script
backup_job() {
if backup_data && validate_integrity; then
curl -X POST "https://api.bubobot.com/heartbeat/backup-job"
fi
}
Heartbeat monitoring ensures backups actually complete with valid data, catching silent failures before emergencies.
2. Cross-Provider Distribution
Primary: AWS (daily operations)
Secondary: GCP (frequent backups)
Emergency: Azure (catastrophic scenarios)
Geographic and jurisdictional separation protects against regional disasters and policy changes.
3. Automated Integrity Validation
javascript
const validateBackup = async (backupFile) => {
const checksum = await calculateChecksum(backupFile);
const expectedSize = await getExpectedSize();
if (checksum !== expectedChecksum || size < expectedSize * 0.95) {
throw new Error('Backup integrity validation failed');
}
};
4. Regular Restore Testing
Multi-cloud backup health requires proving you can actually restore data across different providers with realistic RTOs.
Getting Started Today
Implement backup monitoring for current processes
Add secondary provider storage (start with free tiers)
Test restore operations across providers
Measure actual recovery times
Key insight: Backup systems that can't reliably restore data are just expensive storage solutions.
The best time to implement comprehensive disaster recovery monitoring was yesterday. The second best time is right now.
What's your backup strategy? Share your approach below!
Read more at https://bubobot.com/blog/why-i-back-up-to-multiple-cloud-providers?utm_source=dev.to
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