Please open up a support ticket so we can investigate this. Thanks!

"... when you're relying on them."

Have you ever heard the saying 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket'? You should consider maintaining offsite, incremental backups -- in addition to the backups with D.O.

I do. And that wasn't the point. If a paid for, off-droplet, commercial *regular* backup solution doesn't do what it says, then saying 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket' doesn't really address the point.

As it happens, I *do* maintain daily separate offsite mySQL snapshots (that being the only data that changes), but I pay for D.O. backups so that if I'm not available, my trusted third party can quickly login and restore the server to the last good backup. Not perfect but at least site won't be down for days. A lot safer and quicker than having to explain (and give passwords to) things like Tarsnap and all the mySQL admin passwords and explain shell access and so on.

"If a paid for, off-droplet, commercial *regular* backup solution ..."

You're actually not. I could be wrong, but last I heard, D.O. had yet to start charging for backups.

"... doesn't do what it says, then saying 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket' doesn't really address the point."

Look, nobody was saying that you should not have made D.O. aware of the fact that its backups were not working.

If you spend enough time perusing these threads, you'll encounter an unfortunately amount of people that have mission critical data on a cloud server w/o maintaining an off-site backup; only to go through the excruciating experience of losing their data and realizing that given that nothing on planet Earth is perfect, neither is DigitalOcean; and just like other Internet giants DigitalOcean, too, is susceptible to hardware failures that will result in lost data from time to time (just like its happened to Amazon, GoDaddy, Google, to name a few).

Oooh, I never knew you could format posts! Let me try this...

You're actually not. I could be wrong, but last I heard, D.O. had yet to start charging for backups.

But it does say, in the control panel:

"Please note: We will begin charging for automated backups starting on July 1st, 2013. You will receive your first bill for enabled backups on August 1st, 2013. Pricing is set at 20% of the Droplet's monthly cost (e.g. It will cost $1/mo. to enable backups for a 512MB Droplet)."

So I'm working under the assumption that they would/could/will start billing at any point.

Don't get me wrong, I think DO is fantastic. Best host I've been with, ever. Even better for the price.

My post was merely asking why there'd been no warning, notification, blog post or status to let me know that backups might not be working.

As it happens, support have replied and it WAS a system-wide problem with "the scheduler", so in this instance, a blog post or email might have been courteous as it was clearly known about.

"...in this instance, a blog post or email might have been courteous as it was clearly known about."

Agreed.

Help needed, what is AMS region? thans a lot!

"AMS region" is our datacenter that is located in Amsterdam, NL. Currently we have two different datacenters in AMS, you can choose which datacenter you want your droplet to be created in.