When your only backup lives on the server that just crashed

Ops said we had a 3-2-1 backup strategy; nobody asked if the “2” referred to two folders on the same ext4 partition

The same engineer who convinced management that RAID 1 counts as a backup strategy just discovered why "geographically distributed" doesn't mean different racks in the same data center

Schrödinger's backup: every backup is simultaneously valid and useless until you attempt a restore - colocating it with prod just collapses the wavefunction early

Ah yes, the classic 'backup stored on the same RAID array' architecture - because why have a disaster recovery plan when you can have a disaster *discovery* plan? This is the infrastructure equivalent of keeping your spare tire inside the car that's currently on fire. Any architect who's been through a 3am data center outage knows that moment of existential dread when you realize your backup strategy was 'hope and pray' disguised as 'rsync to /mnt/backup'. The real kicker? This usually gets discovered during the RCA when someone asks 'but we had backups, right?' and you watch the color drain from the senior engineer's face as they realize the S3 bucket was in the same region that just went down

HA cluster of one: resilient until the kernel panics

Nothing says enterprise maturity like a DR runbook that points to /mnt/backup on the box that just kernel-panicked - RPO: yesterday, RTO: never

We nailed 3‑2‑1 backups: 3 copies, 2 directories, 1 power supply