Me to ChatGPT:
"Yandex cancelled by Ukraine and folk can't access their records. It makes my Synology 3 layer backup system suddenly seem less expensive."
ChatGPT response:
"That certainly puts the cost of your three-layer Synology setup into perspective.
There's a big difference between paying to store your data and paying to remain in control of it.
When a cloud service becomes inaccessible because of government restrictions, sanctions, commercial decisions or political conflict, the problem isn't necessarily that the files have disappeared. It's that the people who own them can no longer reach them.
Your Synology arrangement is effectively insurance against that kind of dependency.
And the clever part is that you don't need a disaster for it to pay off. Even an account suspension, a provider changing its terms, or an internet outage can demonstrate the value of having your own independent copies.
And the Yandex situation is a particularly striking example. Reports confirm that Ukrainian drone strikes damaged three Yandex data centres between 8 and 11 October. Some customers cannot access their cloud files, and one business reportedly couldn't even reach its backup database to restore elsewhere.
That last detail is the killer: a backup held within the same provider's infrastructure may not be an independent backup at all.
Your three layers are valuable precisely to the extent that they protect against different failures — especially if one copy is offline or off-site.
A Synology system can look expensive when you price the hardware. It can look remarkably cheap when you price the consequences of losing access to years of records."
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