Hetzner: Hard disk failure at cloud provider causes data loss

Over the past few days, cloud hoster Hetzner experienced a hard drive failure at its server location in Nuremberg. This resulted in the loss of data from around 1,500 snapshots, which could not be restored.

Disk failure at Hetzner

As Hetzner confirmed to heise online magazine, the hard drive failure occurred as early as April 12 and resulted in a loss of data from around 1,500 snapshots at the hosting provider’s Nuremberg data center. It was also not possible to restore the data.

The company said that the data was protected by Erasrure coding technology and distributed across several hard disks via Ceph when asked by heise online. This ensures that the stored snapshots remain complete and can be accessed even if two hard drives fail.

Two hard disks failed, but a third hard disk failure occurred during the rebuild, which ultimately led to the loss of data, according to a company spokesperson.

Affected customers were immediately informed about the data loss by email and apologized. From now on, the company intends to review and, if necessary, improve its data backup procedures, the report continues.

Hetzner Online GmbH launched its Cloud hosting offering at the beginning of 2018, focusing primarily on low entry-level prices. From as little as 4.15 euros per month, you can borrow a server located in Germany and Finland. It was not until January 2021 that they increased their prices immensely due to the rise in electricity prices, which led to displeasure among customers.

Meanwhile, the own status page of Hetzner only informs about a “malfunction of the backbone connection between Frankfurt and Helsinki” on April 17, which was already fixed one day later. No information about the hard disk failure can be found there.