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House burns down/cave collapses -- all pictures gone. Which is how most people run anyway. Personally, I'm using Amazon Cloud Drive for storing pictures.

kohanz 12y ago
Although I haven't implemented it yet, the full plan would be to store the external drive off-site. Granted, that's a much larger inconvenience. Of course cloud storage provides more convenient redundancy, but would it be completely safe to rely on it 100%? Is there no scenario under which Apple or Amazon could end up contacting you to say "Sorry, we lost your data and cannot recover it"? It is very unlikely, but so is your house burning down.
- apetresc 12y ago
  I can't speak to Apple, but I know for a fact that AWS' claimed 11 nines SLA (99.999999999%) for S3 is purely theoretical - in practice, they've never lost an object yet.
  - kohanz 12y ago
    Fair point, but it only takes 1 failure for a catastrophe. I suppose my question would be: is cloud-storage alone enough?
  - pauldino 12y ago
    I've read differently... > Yes. On 12-21-12 Amazon notified us that 4 of our files (out of hundreds of millions) were lost due to a bug encountered while performing some sort of migration. 2 are gone forever and 2 are truncated forever. I've been using S3 for several years at Mixbook and Smule before that--this is the first loss I've experienced. http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanently/answer/Scott-Bonds http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl...
  - skuhn 12y ago
    Untrue, S3 does (extremely rarely) lose objects.
skrause 12y ago
Backup software that locally encrypts data before sending it off to a remote location helps with that problem. I use Arq to backup my photos to S3, but I would feel comfortable to just store all photos unencrypted in iCloud.
- dserodio 12y ago
  I just discovered yesterday that I seem to have lost lots of Arq backups. I downgraded from Yosemite to Mavericks and the only backups Arq shows me are from after the downgrade. I'll dive into this this weekend, I _really_ hope I didn't lose the actual files, just the indexes.

kohanz 12y ago

Although I haven't implemented it yet, the full plan would be to store the external drive off-site. Granted, that's a much larger inconvenience. Of course cloud storage provides more convenient redundancy, but would it be completely safe to rely on it 100%? Is there no scenario under which Apple or Amazon could end up contacting you to say "Sorry, we lost your data and cannot recover it"? It is very unlikely, but so is your house burning down.

apetresc 12y ago
I can't speak to Apple, but I know for a fact that AWS' claimed 11 nines SLA (99.999999999%) for S3 is purely theoretical - in practice, they've never lost an object yet.
- kohanz 12y ago
  Fair point, but it only takes 1 failure for a catastrophe. I suppose my question would be: is cloud-storage alone enough?
- pauldino 12y ago
  I've read differently... > Yes. On 12-21-12 Amazon notified us that 4 of our files (out of hundreds of millions) were lost due to a bug encountered while performing some sort of migration. 2 are gone forever and 2 are truncated forever. I've been using S3 for several years at Mixbook and Smule before that--this is the first loss I've experienced. http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanently/answer/Scott-Bonds http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl...
- skuhn 12y ago
  Untrue, S3 does (extremely rarely) lose objects.

skrause 12y ago

Backup software that locally encrypts data before sending it off to a remote location helps with that problem. I use Arq to backup my photos to S3, but I would feel comfortable to just store all photos unencrypted in iCloud.

dserodio 12y ago
I just discovered yesterday that I seem to have lost lots of Arq backups. I downgraded from Yosemite to Mavericks and the only backups Arq shows me are from after the downgrade. I'll dive into this this weekend, I _really_ hope I didn't lose the actual files, just the indexes.