One kind of anything is a single point of failure.
Well hindsight is always 20/20, but your backup strategy still relied on a single service (that wasn't your own). Backup is one thing no one should completely rely on a third-party. Whether it's a USB drive, good ol' DVDs or what have you, anything else "of your own" is crucial at least weekly if not end-of-day.
The effort going into your backups must match the value you place on your data.
no the problem here was not checking the integrity of your backups.
not a "one kind of anything" single pt of failure problem. he expected LayerVault to not corrupt the PSDs sent through them (and the syncing actions made it worse), which is not unreasonable. it's the same as trusting Photoshop to write PSD files to disk that are identical when opened later.
the difference is that Photoshop is more time-tested and well-known, which changes the odds, but in your argument still would make Photoshop's saving mechanism a single point of failure as well.
and then what, use more different graphic design tools? :)
in your example, if you burn your backups to a good ol' DVD, don't you check that the files are actually on there? and have the burning tool check the integrity? and finally, if you don't check a few of those PSDs to actually load in Photoshop, who knows that the data your DVD burning tool received was correct?
You're right, backups are meaningless if they're unchecked. No different than dumping to a tape drive that's never verified and you get weeks of... nothing.
Well hindsight is always 20/20, but your backup strategy still relied on a single service (that wasn't your own). Backup is one thing no one should completely rely on a third-party. Whether it's a USB drive, good ol' DVDs or what have you, anything else "of your own" is crucial at least weekly if not end-of-day.
The effort going into your backups must match the value you place on your data.