Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#1

Post by bk » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 1:55 PM UTC

Do you treat these systems as "reliable" and "safe" backends (since they're physically and geographically replicated) or do you feel it's still necessary to back up data hosted on their services?

How/where do you back up that data to, especially with large amounts of data (e.g. 100s of GB+)?

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#2

Post by vaksel » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 2:05 PM UTC

Just use both at the same time. Use S3 for active stuff, and Mosso as your secondary backup. The chances of S3 and Mosso crapping out at the same time are pretty much nill. And the cost of hosting something on S3/Mosso, as a one time backup is dirt cheap

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#3

Post by spkthed » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 2:27 PM UTC

Sure? It's like anything else, don't trust a single solution. In addition to local backups S3 is good, in addition to S3, Mosso. There will always be accidents, data loss, corruption, etc. The only way to mitigate that risk is simply to cover your bases and avoid relying on a single thing.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#4

Post by electromagnetic » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 2:52 PM UTC

spkthed wrote: post #3

Sure? It's like anything else, don't trust a single solution. In addition to local backups S3 is good, in addition to S3, Mosso. There will always be accidents, data loss, corruption, etc. The only way to mitigate that risk is simply to cover your bases and avoid relying on a single thing.

Agreed, I have backups on my laptop and external hard drive, so if one of my drives fail I'm covered. If both fail, well that's why I've got the really important stuff backed up on my FTP server.

Every few months I email my hotmail account with all my writing. As text is ridiculously compressible I haven't even hit the 10MB attachment limit. I also have all my more current documents saved in Google Docs, mostly for the portability but also for the very slim chance of an "Oh my god I broke my laptop, holy crap my house burnt down, and dammit I forgot how to connect to my FTP server and for the love of god I forgot the password to my hotmail account."

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#5

Post by charlesju » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 3:02 PM UTC

I trust S3 and Mosso Cloudfiles more-so than my own single-failure HDD. They have a lot of redundancy built into their system, and although every system has risks, its risk are far less than our person undistributed implementations of file storage.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#6

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 3:13 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#7

Post by mikecuesta » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 3:47 PM UTC

I have a lot of faith in S3, more so than any local storage I may have.

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#8

Post by jasonkester » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 4:12 PM UTC

S3 does this for a living. I don't.

S3's entire business revolves around never losing anybody's stuff. They have hordes of smart people working on the problem, and they have an architecture that makes it really hard to lose anything by accident.

My business, on the other hand, revolves around letting people draw cartoon testicles onto other people's powerpoint presentations in the pretense of a "web meeting". Which of us would you rather trust to keep hold of your valuable data?

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#9

Post by nebula » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 5:06 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #8

S3 does this for a living. I don't. S3's entire business revolves around never losing anybody's stuff. They have hordes of smart people working on the problem, and they have an architecture that makes it really hard to lose anything by accident. My business, on the other hand, revolves around letting people draw cartoon testicles onto other people's powerpoint presentations in the pretense of a "web meeting". Which o…

The point here is not about picking winners between S3 and you/me; Probably that's a no-brainer at this point.The thing to worry about is whether S3 is reliable enough that you can trust your user's data with S3 alone.

While S3 might be doing this for a living, Amazon doesn't. AFAIK,revenues from cloud services are not at all significant given Amazon's scale. What does S3 license say? Is Amazon liable if it loses data stored in S3?

Re: Ask HN: Do you trust Amazon S3 or Mosso Cloudfiles not to lose or corrupt your data?

#10

Post by bbuffone » Mon, Mar 23, 2009, 5:06 PM UTC

S3, Mosso and other cloud providers are not an appropriate back up mechanism. These are good for sharing files and a temporary storage system. The only legitimate backup is a physically stored disk. S3 doesn't provide versioning nor deletion protection.

The problem is I hear about these new "Cloud" storage companies claiming backup, but when asked what do they do. They rely on Amazon to move the files into different data centers. But anyone can delete a file or directory by accident and poof the files are gone forever.

If the storage provider does have permanent physical storage in there backup plans, don't think your files are forever.