Yandex, sometimes called Russia’s Google, has updated its customers in the wake of extensive damage to its data centers in drone strikes. In a blog post this week, the firm’s cloud business boasted that it had “restored access to more than 97% of customer data” [machine translation]. That might sound like a great success, but in the small print, as highlighted by The Register, there’s the admission “the remaining 2.84% cannot be restored due to critical damage to equipment.”
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Data centers operated by Yandex have been under attack from Ukrainian drones for several weeks now. We covered reports about withering online troll activity and online payment system disruption last month. We know of at least three Yandex locations that have been damaged by Ukrainian drone assaults to date.
The recent Yandex blog post also appears to blame the small proportion of users who suffered unrecoverable data loss for not making backups. When talking about the 2.84% of data that cannot be restored, it says that was partly due to “the lack of customer backups on the platform.” In contrast, those who made use of the Yandex Cloud backup tools “did not lose any data,” says the firm.
Yandex has now changed the backup policy, so that “currently, all virtual machines created in Yandex Cloud work with the backup function enabled by default.” Even if Putin decides to end his war on Ukraine, it might be beneficial to stick with a backup-by-default policy. Users are advised to have their own data backup systems in addition to the cloud. Following the 3-2-1 backup strategy, for example.
Yandex is also opening a new ru-central1-f availability zone at a new location. This is designed to improve the cloud’s fault tolerance and disaster resilience. Servers at ru-central1-f will be more limited in the range of services they can offer, for now. Yandex didn’t share any geographic details of the newly opened datacenter site.
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