LucidLink Outage: Why Backup Redundancy Matters

LucidLink's April 2024 outage, which took filespaces offline for almost two days (April 29 to May 1), showed how many studios, teams, and enterprises have no real plan for when a cloud service goes down. LucidLink has had strong uptime in recent years, but distributed post-production now leans so hard on cloud services that a backup strategy isn't optional anymore. Don't treat any cloud platform as the only place your data lives.

The Risk of Relying Solely on Cloud File Services

Putting all your data with one cloud provider makes that provider a single point of failure. Natural disasters, cyber incidents, software bugs, and operational mistakes can all cause outages or data loss, and mature, well-built platforms still have incidents. In this case, metadata controller failures cut off access even though the underlying object storage was healthy.

Redundant Backups Across Multiple Sources

The fix is a 3‑2‑1 backup strategy: keep at least 3 copies of your data, on 2 different storage mediums, with 1 copy stored offsite.

For LucidLink users, this can look like:

1. Primary copy in LucidLink storage (IBM, Wasabi, or a custom S3 backend)
2. Secondary copy synchronized to on‑premises storage, such as a local NAS or directly attached hard drives
3. Tertiary copy synchronized to an alternative S3‑compatible or cloud storage provider (e.g., Backblaze B2, Storj, Google, Dropbox, Box)

Spread your data across independent platforms and locations, and a single provider or service layer going down won't stop production. The other copies are still there, and your team keeps working.