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Maybe; realistically, the Internet speed would probably be more of a limiting factor. At mine, it would take almost a week to fill up 1 terabyte of storage. Tha

Maybe; realistically, the Internet speed would probably be more of a limiting factor. At mine, it would take almost a week to fill up 1 terabyte of storage. That's plenty of time to go get a few more HDDs. At 1 Gbps you'd have about 2 hours.

gpcz 11y ago
I think you're underestimating the scale of this problem. According to http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/facebook-builds-new-data-centers-for-cold-storage/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/faceb... , people upload 350 million new photos per day, and they have 240 billion photos total. If we use 1 MB per photo as an average, you'd need about 334 terabytes to store a day of Facebook's pictures. You'd need 228882 terabytes to store the whole thing. Assuming Wikipedia's estimate of $35/TB for desktop hard drives, it would cost about $8 million to store Facebook's photo archive (that's without videos or text). Actually hosting it would cost even more.
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  If you were bent on getting it all, even at 1 Gbps: (228882 TB to Gb) sec to years = 58 yr 3 w 1 day 18 h 40 min 58 years is going to take a long time
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    You can split that across multiple attackers, though. A botnet of 58 machines would be able to do it in about a year by that math. Once you cross into the thousands, a full dump like this is suddenly feasible. That's why this is more a storage problem than a bandwidth problem in practice. That's a lot of hard drives. While it might be possible to build up a botnet of a few hundred thousand slave machines to download and store it all, the task is by no means trivial.
- lobe 11y ago
  If you wanted to go after photos for everyone I would agree with you. Probably just as interesting would be grabbing everyone's private messages, and although a large dump, would be nowhere as hard to store. A further option would be to filter whose photos you steal, so you only target celebrities and/or the rich and famous for maximum effect. It all depends on the aims of the hacker, but I would imagine you could make a devastating attack without stealing all of Facebook's data

gpcz 11y ago

I think you're underestimating the scale of this problem. According to http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/facebook-builds-new-data-centers-for-cold-storage/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/faceb... , people upload 350 million new photos per day, and they have 240 billion photos total. If we use 1 MB per photo as an average, you'd need about 334 terabytes to store a day of Facebook's pictures. You'd need 228882 terabytes to store the whole thing. Assuming Wikipedia's estimate of $35/TB for desktop hard drives, it would cost about $8 million to store Facebook's photo archive (that's without videos or text). Actually hosting it would cost even more.

0942v8653 11y ago
If you were bent on getting it all, even at 1 Gbps: (228882 TB to Gb) sec to years = 58 yr 3 w 1 day 18 h 40 min 58 years is going to take a long time
- yellowapple 11y ago
  You can split that across multiple attackers, though. A botnet of 58 machines would be able to do it in about a year by that math. Once you cross into the thousands, a full dump like this is suddenly feasible. That's why this is more a storage problem than a bandwidth problem in practice. That's a lot of hard drives. While it might be possible to build up a botnet of a few hundred thousand slave machines to download and store it all, the task is by no means trivial.
lobe 11y ago
If you wanted to go after photos for everyone I would agree with you. Probably just as interesting would be grabbing everyone's private messages, and although a large dump, would be nowhere as hard to store. A further option would be to filter whose photos you steal, so you only target celebrities and/or the rich and famous for maximum effect. It all depends on the aims of the hacker, but I would imagine you could make a devastating attack without stealing all of Facebook's data