With some of the cloud providers, their built in backups are linked to the resource. So even if you have super duper geo-zone redundant backups for years, they still get nuked if you drop the server.
It’s always felt a bit stupid, but the backups can still normally be restored by support.
“and database snapshots that Grigorev had counted on as backups” – yes, this is exactly how you run “production”.
With some of the cloud providers, their built in backups are linked to the resource. So even if you have super duper geo-zone redundant backups for years, they still get nuked if you drop the server.
It’s always felt a bit stupid, but the backups can still normally be restored by support.