3 ms·

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 proble

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?

nebula 18y ago
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?
gcv 18y ago
S3 does this for a living. I don't. So does Carbonite, and, as you can see in today's news, it also lost people's data. I strongly suspect Amazon does a better job than Carbonite with both software and infrastructure, but still. Mistakes happen, bugs happen, and data gets lost even by smart people working for solid and reputable companies. S3 only backups = eggs in one basket. It's a terrific, strong basket made of titanium and suspended on aircraft cable, but it's still just one basket.
- sgoraya 18y ago
  So does Carbonite... Good example - when I read the story I was not surprised. It was bound to happen to at least a company or two. I used carbonite for a bit before I went back to my own server (w/nightly backup). I thought I let my paranoid tendancies take over, but I just never felt good backing up my data to carbonite, et. al. I also agree that S3 is much more failproof but would still rather keep things on my own server. I may be doing different in the future though, but for now there is no place like my own server!

nebula 18y ago

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?

gcv 18y ago

S3 does this for a living. I don't. So does Carbonite, and, as you can see in today's news, it also lost people's data. I strongly suspect Amazon does a better job than Carbonite with both software and infrastructure, but still. Mistakes happen, bugs happen, and data gets lost even by smart people working for solid and reputable companies. S3 only backups = eggs in one basket. It's a terrific, strong basket made of titanium and suspended on aircraft cable, but it's still just one basket.

sgoraya 18y ago
So does Carbonite... Good example - when I read the story I was not surprised. It was bound to happen to at least a company or two. I used carbonite for a bit before I went back to my own server (w/nightly backup). I thought I let my paranoid tendancies take over, but I just never felt good backing up my data to carbonite, et. al. I also agree that S3 is much more failproof but would still rather keep things on my own server. I may be doing different in the future though, but for now there is no place like my own server!