Ceph is highly redundant and when properly designed should have no single point of failure and be resilient to many types of hardware failures. However, one in a million situations do occur and as we have also discussed, human error can be very unpredictable. In both cases, there is a chance that the Ceph cluster may enter a state where it is unavailable or data loss occurs. In many cases, it may be possible to recover some or all of the data and return the cluster to full operation. However, in all cases, a full backup and recovery plan should be discussed before putting any live data onto a Ceph cluster. Many businesses have gone out of business or lost faith from customers when it's revealed that not only has there been an extended period of downtime, but critical data has also been lost. It may be that as a result of discussion it is agreed that a backup and recovery plan is not required; this is fine. As long as risks and possible outcomes have been discussed and agreed, that is the important part.