I almost forgot to mention, I know people who work at rackspace and I've talked to them. Your logs & database being deleted is effectively a non-issue, it's a pain to recover but you can bet that they have the capability of recovering every last byte of missing information.
This has bugged me as well. Until this episode I had the impression that Rackspace was a serious hosting provider. Not some garage with a couple of racks on UPS and a fat ADSL line. A serious hosting provider keep multiple backups of customer data off-site, because losing a lot of customer data due to some catastrophic event means losing their business. Unlinking it from a web page just makes the data a bit more inconvenient to get to. Impossible for the customer, but in no way impossible for Rackspace. The data may be older than current, but I find it hard to believe that off-site backups were instantly deleted along with the servers. Backup systems just aren't built for easy deletion.
Perhaps someone from Bitoinica can comment on how they have worked with Rackspace to rescue data?
We have talked to a manager and he confirms that no data can be recovered. We have even offered a $10,000 tip for any information recovered, but later they got the bad news again.
Rackspace shouldn't be used for serious applications, because of the following "features":
- You can own all servers in an account with an email.
- You can't force someone to log out, not even any Rackspace employee.
- You can suspend the servers through customer support. They will say it's safe. But anyone can delete the servers.
- When you delete something, even in Cloud Files, it's permanent.
- When the thief is in your account, you can't do anything to prevent him from doing anything destructive.
For these reasons, I personally will never use Rackspace Cloud again unless they address all of these issues. AWS is way more secure than them.
