3 ms·

I'm not the OP but I'll add my datapoint here. I have that just because of digital photography. My current 12MP camera fills up a 16GB card easily if I am cover

by pedrocr 16y ago

I'm not the OP but I'll add my datapoint here. I have that just because of digital photography. My current 12MP camera fills up a 16GB card easily if I am covering a 2-3 hour event for some friend. That adds up fast. Right now I do a versioned rsync to a server I host myself that has a (just upgraded from 1TB) 4.5TB RAID5 array. That was ~400$ in disks when I upgraded. Even at the current ~1TB usage that would be 3600$ per year in tarsnap storage alone, without the bandwidth cost. What I'm still missing is a way to backup that server. I could just collocate a second server for a fraction of the tarsnap cost, and I don't really want to be backing up into physical media (tapes or drives) and shuttling that to a deposit box. What I need is tarsnap only 10x cheaper. I'll accept a lower redundancy than S3 for it and especially a lower turnaround time for restores. S3 seems to be built for on-line transactional stuff not backups so is a poor fit for these services. Even the reduced redundancy version only seems a marginal difference.

sreitshamer 16y ago
Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges. The biggest difference I think is the data are stored in multiple data centers and Amazon takes care of all the issues with that. There were a lot of interesting comments about S3 cost here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225 It would be awesome if Amazon offered something analogous to a single offsite automagically-expanding RAID volume for a lot less money than S3.
- pedrocr 16y ago
  > Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges. And that was exactly my point. Amazon is selling apples and I want an orange. Tarsnap is an apple pie and is the perfect kind of pie I want. But I want an orange pie. I would be ok with a service that didn't give me online access to my data. Run a very large stack of removable SATA drive slots. Copy incoming files into two of them in two locations. Store them securely when they are full. Fetch them back when I need to restore. That should cut way down on the CapEx of all the NAS/SAN hardware S3 has to run.
  - carterschonwald 16y ago
    yes, something like this would be very nice. An analogous version would be to have a "netflix-lite" of data where you mail in a portable hd, they slurp out your data into (by default ) your private store, and then write the data (whether private or public) at the top of your request queue back into the hd and mail it back to you. Subject to pricing, reliability and privacy infrastructure being sane / good, I'd be very interested in that
    - pedrocr 16y ago
      I see what you are saying. I would rather do a daily sync of any changed files as the deltas would be small and then maybe have the option to do a full restore by getting a disk couriered to me if I'm in a hurry or fetching it online if I don't mind downloading files for a week or two. What I want to avoid is to have to bother about backups in the normal case. I just want to set it up properly as a daily cron job and mostly forget about it. Putting physical disks in the mail or safety deposit boxes is too much trouble. The server I want to backup isn't even usually physically next to me. This problem is only growing as people get better cameras and start shooting a bunch of video and stills that take up a bunch of space. An interesting solution would be a mix of this online service plus a NAS appliance to put on the home network that does fast filesharing and automatic backups locally and to the online service. When a disk in the appliance fails you call the guys and they send you a replacement drive with the data already in it.

by pedrocr 16y ago

sreitshamer 16y ago

Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges. The biggest difference I think is the data are stored in multiple data centers and Amazon takes care of all the issues with that. There were a lot of interesting comments about S3 cost here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225 It would be awesome if Amazon offered something analogous to a single offsite automagically-expanding RAID volume for a lot less money than S3.

pedrocr 16y ago
> Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges. And that was exactly my point. Amazon is selling apples and I want an orange. Tarsnap is an apple pie and is the perfect kind of pie I want. But I want an orange pie. I would be ok with a service that didn't give me online access to my data. Run a very large stack of removable SATA drive slots. Copy incoming files into two of them in two locations. Store them securely when they are full. Fetch them back when I need to restore. That should cut way down on the CapEx of all the NAS/SAN hardware S3 has to run.
- carterschonwald 16y ago
  yes, something like this would be very nice. An analogous version would be to have a "netflix-lite" of data where you mail in a portable hd, they slurp out your data into (by default ) your private store, and then write the data (whether private or public) at the top of your request queue back into the hd and mail it back to you. Subject to pricing, reliability and privacy infrastructure being sane / good, I'd be very interested in that
  - pedrocr 16y ago
    I see what you are saying. I would rather do a daily sync of any changed files as the deltas would be small and then maybe have the option to do a full restore by getting a disk couriered to me if I'm in a hurry or fetching it online if I don't mind downloading files for a week or two. What I want to avoid is to have to bother about backups in the normal case. I just want to set it up properly as a daily cron job and mostly forget about it. Putting physical disks in the mail or safety deposit boxes is too much trouble. The server I want to backup isn't even usually physically next to me. This problem is only growing as people get better cameras and start shooting a bunch of video and stills that take up a bunch of space. An interesting solution would be a mix of this online service plus a NAS appliance to put on the home network that does fast filesharing and automatic backups locally and to the online service. When a disk in the appliance fails you call the guys and they send you a replacement drive with the data already in it.