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I just compared the pricing of S3 and Google Storage and at this stage, S3 wins hands down http://www.manu-j.com/blog/amazon-s3-vs-google-storage/490/ http://w

I just compared the pricing of S3 and Google Storage and at this stage, S3 wins hands down http://www.manu-j.com/blog/amazon-s3-vs-google-storage/490/ http://www.manu-j.com/blog/amazon-s3-vs-google-storage/490/

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
drewcrawford 16y ago
I keep trying to find a cloud service that will let me back up all my computers (3TB) for a reasonable price ($<500/yr) and let me manage it (no Backblaze, Mozy, etc.) It continues to amaze me that nothing comes close to simply colocating a NAS. This has to be a problem that affects absolutely every computing professional (and even a lot of nonprofessionals--gamers, ad agencies, etc.). How can the only viable solution be roll-your-own? And if you think about it, even colocating 3TB is horribly inefficient. Splitting a Backblaze Pod 20 ways might cut the cost in half.
- cperciva 16y ago
  It continues to amaze me that nothing comes close to simply colocating a NAS. If you colocate a NAS, there's a significant chance that you'll lose all your data. Amazon and Google, quite sensibly, don't want the bad publicity which would come with losing their users' data, so they replicate across multiple datacenters -- even Amazon's reduced reliability storage replicates to two datacenters -- which obviously increases costs.
  - drewcrawford 16y ago
    [edit: figures were wildly off] By definition, it's already the second copy of my data (since it's a backup). For the price of S3 (~$5500/yr, not even including bandwidth), I could colocate 7 RAIDed NASes ($700 NAS, 4-year life, $50/month colocation fee). If me and a couple of friends agree to exchange NASes to save on colocation fees, I could have 31 NASes for the price of S3. For maybe 50% the price of S3, I could colocate a Backblaze pod and have 67TB of data storage, 22x my need.
    - alecco 16y ago
      Amazon S3 just announced a "Reduced Redundancy" version of S3 priced about 33% cheaper. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
- earl 16y ago
  Mozy is a piece of shit. Avoid it like the plague. My favorite bit of their crap software is freaking out at odd times on my mac and sucking all IO rendering the computer unusable. And no, not at scheduled backup times. Perhaps these morons are reading the entire backup set and rehashing it instead of watching for changes? Dunno. This behavior persisted even after I told it to stop backing anything up at all. What I do know is the client sucks ass and the web has many stories of people unable to recover their data when they needed it.
  - motdiem 16y ago
    Earl, I've heard this repeatedly - do you happen to have a pointer or an explanation as to why Mozy is a piece of shit ? Just interested as from a non-specialist, it looked like an interesting offering
    - wizard_2 16y ago
      I'll echo the sentiment except from the windows side. I had the mozy pro deployed on 5 users laptops that were frequently connected to 100mbit internet connections. I never was able to get all 5 machines to continue to backup on their own. I constantly had to force the backups, add more resources (even though it should have auto purchased more storage), and deal with users complaining their computers were much slower. The worst part was the outlook archives, large multigigbyte files it would try to compress and encrypt without splitting. We use jungle disk now, nobody notices it and it works.
- siverson914 16y ago
  I totally agree and that's why I'm a cofounder of Diomede Storage. Check us out. We're cloud storage specifically focused on backup and archival data and our "offline" storage is $0.03/GB/month. www.diomedestorage.com
- barrkel 16y ago
  I like CrashPlan. It can back up to multiple destinations, both their own data center and other machines (such as friends etc.) that you have an agreement with (e.g. you can act as reciprocal remote backup destinations). I don't know if that's hands-on enough for you, but it works for me. Since the guts of it are in Java, it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and even my Solaris (Nexenta) box. Not directly applicable to your case, but I'm using the data center plan (CrashPlan Central), which under the "family plan" is 180 USD / 3 years for all machines in your house. It says it's unlimited; we'll see :) I have around 10T of storage across all the machines here at home (mostly 7T in a ZFS raidz pool), but only about 500G of the most important stuff is currently backed up since I signed up, which was a couple of months ago. I upload about 10G a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. All encrypted, data deduplication, etc. - I'm using the Plus client. I did at one point consider continuing with my home-grown rdiff-backup approach, with some chunking (to reduce object count) and sync to S3 with s3sync, but S3 is quite expensive for larger amounts of data.
- dalore 16y ago
  It's no cloud but I've used rsync.net as an offsite backup. Unlimited bandwith and you just pay for storage with discounts for volume. Cheapest they show is $0.32/GB/mo. All though for 3TB that would come out to roughly $983/mo a far cry from your wanted $500/yr. The problem with co-locating a NAS is that you have to also support it.
- mleonhard 16y ago
  I'm working on a backup web service that might meet your needs. When you say 'and let me manage it' what exactly do you mean? I'd love to hear from you and anyone else on HN: leonhard attt backupwebservice dotttttt com.
bryanh 16y ago
I'm really sad there aren't some price wars going on here between S3 and Google. Maybe S3 should fire the first shot.
- jbrennan 16y ago
  Would you lower your prices if your new competitor already costs more?
- chegra 16y ago
  Decreasing pricing is not a competitive strategy. They can compete through the quality of their service, the quality of their customer support, their interface simplicity, additional services bundled with the storage such as the prediction api etc. But never compete on price.
akronim 16y ago
It's a labs release - they don't want to get every S3 customer on day one. This pricing is a good way to get some beta users and soft launch. I'm sure they wouldn't be in this if they weren't going to match s3 pricing at some point.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

drewcrawford 16y ago

I keep trying to find a cloud service that will let me back up all my computers (3TB) for a reasonable price ($<500/yr) and let me manage it (no Backblaze, Mozy, etc.) It continues to amaze me that nothing comes close to simply colocating a NAS. This has to be a problem that affects absolutely every computing professional (and even a lot of nonprofessionals--gamers, ad agencies, etc.). How can the only viable solution be roll-your-own? And if you think about it, even colocating 3TB is horribly inefficient. Splitting a Backblaze Pod 20 ways might cut the cost in half.

cperciva 16y ago
It continues to amaze me that nothing comes close to simply colocating a NAS. If you colocate a NAS, there's a significant chance that you'll lose all your data. Amazon and Google, quite sensibly, don't want the bad publicity which would come with losing their users' data, so they replicate across multiple datacenters -- even Amazon's reduced reliability storage replicates to two datacenters -- which obviously increases costs.
- drewcrawford 16y ago
  [edit: figures were wildly off] By definition, it's already the second copy of my data (since it's a backup). For the price of S3 (~$5500/yr, not even including bandwidth), I could colocate 7 RAIDed NASes ($700 NAS, 4-year life, $50/month colocation fee). If me and a couple of friends agree to exchange NASes to save on colocation fees, I could have 31 NASes for the price of S3. For maybe 50% the price of S3, I could colocate a Backblaze pod and have 67TB of data storage, 22x my need.
  - alecco 16y ago
    Amazon S3 just announced a "Reduced Redundancy" version of S3 priced about 33% cheaper. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
earl 16y ago
Mozy is a piece of shit. Avoid it like the plague. My favorite bit of their crap software is freaking out at odd times on my mac and sucking all IO rendering the computer unusable. And no, not at scheduled backup times. Perhaps these morons are reading the entire backup set and rehashing it instead of watching for changes? Dunno. This behavior persisted even after I told it to stop backing anything up at all. What I do know is the client sucks ass and the web has many stories of people unable to recover their data when they needed it.
- motdiem 16y ago
  Earl, I've heard this repeatedly - do you happen to have a pointer or an explanation as to why Mozy is a piece of shit ? Just interested as from a non-specialist, it looked like an interesting offering
  - wizard_2 16y ago
    I'll echo the sentiment except from the windows side. I had the mozy pro deployed on 5 users laptops that were frequently connected to 100mbit internet connections. I never was able to get all 5 machines to continue to backup on their own. I constantly had to force the backups, add more resources (even though it should have auto purchased more storage), and deal with users complaining their computers were much slower. The worst part was the outlook archives, large multigigbyte files it would try to compress and encrypt without splitting. We use jungle disk now, nobody notices it and it works.
siverson914 16y ago
I totally agree and that's why I'm a cofounder of Diomede Storage. Check us out. We're cloud storage specifically focused on backup and archival data and our "offline" storage is $0.03/GB/month. www.diomedestorage.com
barrkel 16y ago
I like CrashPlan. It can back up to multiple destinations, both their own data center and other machines (such as friends etc.) that you have an agreement with (e.g. you can act as reciprocal remote backup destinations). I don't know if that's hands-on enough for you, but it works for me. Since the guts of it are in Java, it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and even my Solaris (Nexenta) box. Not directly applicable to your case, but I'm using the data center plan (CrashPlan Central), which under the "family plan" is 180 USD / 3 years for all machines in your house. It says it's unlimited; we'll see :) I have around 10T of storage across all the machines here at home (mostly 7T in a ZFS raidz pool), but only about 500G of the most important stuff is currently backed up since I signed up, which was a couple of months ago. I upload about 10G a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. All encrypted, data deduplication, etc. - I'm using the Plus client. I did at one point consider continuing with my home-grown rdiff-backup approach, with some chunking (to reduce object count) and sync to S3 with s3sync, but S3 is quite expensive for larger amounts of data.
dalore 16y ago
It's no cloud but I've used rsync.net as an offsite backup. Unlimited bandwith and you just pay for storage with discounts for volume. Cheapest they show is $0.32/GB/mo. All though for 3TB that would come out to roughly $983/mo a far cry from your wanted $500/yr. The problem with co-locating a NAS is that you have to also support it.
mleonhard 16y ago
I'm working on a backup web service that might meet your needs. When you say 'and let me manage it' what exactly do you mean? I'd love to hear from you and anyone else on HN: leonhard attt backupwebservice dotttttt com.

bryanh 16y ago

I'm really sad there aren't some price wars going on here between S3 and Google. Maybe S3 should fire the first shot.

jbrennan 16y ago
Would you lower your prices if your new competitor already costs more?
chegra 16y ago
Decreasing pricing is not a competitive strategy. They can compete through the quality of their service, the quality of their customer support, their interface simplicity, additional services bundled with the storage such as the prediction api etc. But never compete on price.

akronim 16y ago

It's a labs release - they don't want to get every S3 customer on day one. This pricing is a good way to get some beta users and soft launch. I'm sure they wouldn't be in this if they weren't going to match s3 pricing at some point.