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Typically in websites, when a user wants to permanently delete his/her account, is necessary to remove this account also from the backups to avoid unwanted reactivations in case of backup restoration?

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    I'm wondering how you are going to accomplish removing specific files from an already existing (old) backups. Also how many backups do you have to take care of? Isn't this kind of an odd way to do things?
    – mdpc
    Feb 20, 2013 at 17:09
  • I suspect you have some accounting/tracking system to know what users have been removed since the last backup? If so, you just re-delete those users after the restore and then bring the system back into service. Feb 20, 2013 at 18:48

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No, you don't want to go messing with previous backups. The next backup which is made will not contain the deleted user anymore. Your backups should be frequent enough that if you need to restore one there isn't too much work to redo (like deleting users again).

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  • Ok, ok. Simply I was wondering how big sites like Facebook or Twitter would do this. So, they backup frequently enough to avoid this kind of situations. I suppose they also have a tracking system of active users to check against it, no? Feb 20, 2013 at 22:54
  • If Facebook or Twitter had a big enough catastrophe to require a backup restore I would expect that users deleted since the last backup would become undeleted.
    – mgorven
    Feb 20, 2013 at 22:56
  • This would be topic for another question, but I'm not sure about the application of the European privacy legislation. If the user wants to delete its data permanently, this would imply to do the removal also in backups? Thanks anyway ;) Feb 20, 2013 at 23:05
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I'd not go messing with backups (don't put your fallback at risk!). You could keep separate, more frequent, backups of the accounts' data if needed.

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