3 ms·

Seems somewhat silly, the idea that it's difficult for a company to not store your stuff.

• noblethrasher 14y ago
  Difficult because of automatic backups, archiving, and such.
• sweis 14y ago
  Think about availability. A large web site is going to keep replicated copies of data across many geographic locations, plus backed up in long term storage. Those data are stored in hardware that is continually coming in and out of service. It's actually very hard to say with certainty that every copy of a particular piece of data has been deleted.
  • cma 14y ago
    Why should it ever be written to permanent storage?
    • loeg 14y ago
      Because RAM is orders of magnitude more expensive than spinning rust, or even SSDs.
      • cma 14y ago
        These are messages that last 20 seconds, there is no time that they will be on disk and not cached to ram anyway. (edit: well I guess it is 20 seconds after it is received)
        • loeg 14y ago
          The messages are stored for two days. Backups for 90… And: writing to (spinning) disk takes on the order of milliseconds. 20 seconds of RAM storage time (versus milliseconds) means several orders of magnitude larger working set size, which may well be larger than you can afford…
• kami8845 14y ago
  In recent history it only really seems to be difficult for Facebook
  • vidarh 14y ago
    That's because only Facebook have seemed to be uninterested in making the data unavailable for many types, at least historically. Don't fall into the trap of assuming that just because you don't get to see the data, that it's not stored all over the place at other companies.