Permanent data loss
Irreversible destruction of hosted data, distinct from service interruption, occurring when no usable copy survives elsewhere.
March 10, 2021: the fire at OVHcloud's SBG2 site in Strasbourg destroys servers whose customers in some cases had no backup off the site, and their data is gone for good. Permanent data loss is the irreversible destruction of hosted data, and it differs from a simple service interruption. After an outage, a service can be restored within hours. Data destroyed with no usable copy elsewhere does not come back, however quickly the technical service returns. The risk fully materializes when a client's backup sits on the same site as its production data. Smaller organizations do this more often than one might assume, to save money or because they underestimate local accumulation risk. For insurers, the question is valuation. A physical server is easily priced at its replacement cost. Lost proprietary data (a customer database, source code, accounting history) is worth whatever it costs to reconstruct, if it can be reconstructed at all. This peril has accelerated the adoption of backups held geographically apart from the production site, an implicit or explicit condition of insurability for a digital business.
After the March 2021 fire at OVHcloud's Strasbourg site, clients who had kept no backup outside the destroyed building permanently lost their data, even though the hosting service itself could eventually be rebuilt elsewhere.
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