Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's New Storage Service
dlaur writes to tell us that today Amazon announced their Simple Storage Service (S3) allowing users to store unlimited amounts of data at $0.15 per GB paid monthly. From the article: "S3 was purportedly built to support both Amazon's own internal applications and the external users of the Amazon Web Services platform. That should be proper motivation to build a service that's fast and robust enough for mission critical use, yet flexible enough to support any storage task thrown at it."
Now that even Google has been ordered to hand over all the search data, you can bet that the government will want access to all S3 data, too.
The owls are not what they seem
Current hard disks sell for 40c/gig. If you plan to keep your data for >3 months, it is more economical to use you harddisks. Though your solution has other advantages (data accessible from anywhere, no need to administer yourself your servers, etc).
But hard disks present their own challenges.
You should really use some sort of redundant arrangement to make sure that a failure of your backup device wont result in data loss.
You then need to either offsite the drives or keep them in a firesafe, in which case you probably need two sets of them so that you can keep one live and the other somewhere safe.
And of course the amazon solution leaves your data accessiblwe from anywhere.
This sounds good, as of lately my maxtor one touch HDD has been getting more and more corrupt sectors, and I am sick of running chkdsk overnight on it. I figure it's going to die on me soon and I don't look forward to getting another HDD.
Anyways, back on topic, at $0.15 a gig, it would take a long time before buying a hdd would be more affordable for me. (my hdd is 250g, I use about 100g, 100g = 15$, so after 10 months thats 150$... Still cheaper than this HDD that I didn't even get a year ago, on sale, for 200$)
I wonder if they will have an issue with my "favorite Bible quotes/hope_cops_dont_see_this" folder, or all of the iso's I downloaded *shify eyes*
Scott Swezey
lets see... for a year of 200gigs, that's $360 USD.
couldn't I jut buy a new hard drive every year or burn hundreds of DVDs for far far less? not to mention they'd be secure from whatever prying eyes or security holes an online backup provides.
Internet hard drives were tried years ago during the dot-com bubble and failed miserably. What's different about Amazon's service? If I can buy a whole new hard drive for about 30 cents a gig, why would I want the hassle of uploading and downloading from a remote site?
Not to mention the time it would take to upload a few gigabytes -- cable modems are good at downloading, but they are NOT good at uploading.
First, hard drives are a very poor choice for backups. In addition to media failure, you also have serious problems with failure of the electronic hardware. There are just too many single points of failure. Tape is far superior.
Second, unless you have an extraordinary fire-proof safe, off site if far superior. Fire-proof safes are really only fire resistant -- it is merely a question of how long it takes for the internal contents to get warm enough to destroy the contents.
8) If your Application is determined (for any reason or no reason at all, in our sole discretion) to be unsuitable for Amazon Web Services, we may suspend your access to Amazon Web Services or terminate this Agreement at any time, without notice.
I am not sure I see the point of using a storage service that has the right to unilaterally terminate my agreement and thus, presumably, destroy anything I have stored.
]{
Except that the upload speeds for most home users is pretty bad. You'd spending a lot of time pushing files depending on exactly what you chose to backup.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I find it disturbing that I do not trust the State enough to place my data with a third party provider for fear of my privacy potentially being violated.
Of course, my data is unimportant and the State has no interest in me; but *as such* it should be the case that my data isn't even *potentially* accessable to the State - and yet I rather suspect that it is.
As such, I am actually now being suppressed by the State; the State behaves in such a way that I, to preserve my privacy, have to protect myself.
The State is way, way too big for its own good; it's destroying now the freedoms it was created to protect.
My minimal requirements would be Webdav, sftp, and rsync-ssh; SOAP and REST I don't care about.
Oh, and also it should come from a company that isn't running a vast data mining operation.
I was hoping for a bookshelf. I wanted a somewhere to store my books and all I got was this lousy online file store.
I read the documentation this afternoon. Very clever use of REST, SOAP and BitTorrent. They provide client libraries for many languages.
I can see why Amazon is providing this; to make money off their excess bandwidth and storage space.
I can't really see why a customer would want to use it though. Why not just use a real web host? Amazon S3 has is no minimum monthly fee, has redundancy built into it, guaranteed availability.
Compared with Dreamhost (say) which has a bundle for almost 10 USD/mo. That deal has 20GB + 1TB transfers. For the same amout on Amazon S3 you only 5 GB + 64GB transfers, and doesn't have FTP nor SSH access, nor your own domain, etc etc.
Maybe we should think of it as an inexpensive web cache, like akamai.
I suspect that even Amazon doesn't know what this will be useful for. The developed it for their own use, then polished up for resell. Now they wait for the applications to appear.
Here we go again.
Tape has fewer points of failure than a hard drive?
Oh, please...
Explain to me why the entire industry is moving to disk-to-disk recovery backup with tape relegated to archival backup.
Explain to me why most data is kept on hard drives for day to day use if they are so failure prone.
Optimum backup requires disk-to-disk for quick and absolutely reliable recovery. For security, disk-to-disk over the network to an offsite location allows for fully automated reliable offsite backup, but it is expensive in bandwidth even if you only transmit deltas. For offsite storage where netword bandwidth is not available or too expensive, for long-term archival storage, tape is useful - provided the tapes are maintained properly, stored properly and not overused.
Modern tape systems can be very fast and very large, and can cost less than equivalent capacity disk drives, but the fact of the matter is that industry studies show more problems with tape backups than with disk backups. Between equipment failure and operator error, tape backup is problematical for recovery purposes.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
With Googles's library initiative, the leaks on GDrive, the A9 search, Google vs Amazon is starting to look like an epic fight ( googol vs amazon - does sound like a corny clash of the titans). Can't be much longer before MS and Amazon partners unless Amazon is too (rightly) suspicious of MS's long term plans..
Good for us though, Google and Amazon seem to take different approaches to most things, and ultimately that will provide variety, and good innovative competition (unlike MS).
As an aside, the fact that theres additional charges per gb transferred as mentioned earlier in the discussion will have a major impact, on its business, impact and utility. Ofcourse it would eliminate abuse, if you can call maximally utilising a paid service abuse. Like the latest netflix saga.
Two words: "Fuck them".
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The way you describe it makes it sound quite useless. We need full as well as incremental backups (who wants to upload 10 GB every night???) that can be automated to run nightly. Manual backups are worse than useless.
A good Open Source encrypted back up solution that makes use of this in an intelligent way would be great. I really want to automatically store my photo's and important document outside my house. Houses do burn occaionally, computers get stolen by burglars. No need to loose all your important data in the process.
X.
. . . if someone steals your computer, they steal your backup too.
If you're silly enough to keep your solitary backup in your frickin' computer.
Go tell your friend that God has invented external drives. Then tell him that you'll keep his if he'll keep yours.
KFG
Tape has fewer points of failure than a hard drive?
It does, because, unlike hard-drives, the media and the reading mechanism separate components. If your read head drives on your hard-drive, it is difficult and expensive (but not impossible) to retrieve your data.
Explain to me why the entire industry is moving to disk-to-disk recovery backup with tape relegated to archival backup.
Convenience
Explain to me why most data is kept on hard drives for day to day use if they are so failure prone.
Convenience
Hard drives are more prone to failures than tape drives, but that can be alleviated through stuff like RAID. Hard drives are more convenient than tape for all but the most fundamental backup needs (full backup, full restore).I prefer to use hard drives too; but they are more prone to failure than tape. If I had to choose to trust all my data to a single tape or a single hard drive, I'd go tape every time. If I had the capacity to create a redundant array of hard drives, I'd go with hard drives. If I needed offsite storage on a budget, I'd go with tape - it's easier to transport and store than a hard drive array. If I had the money for it, or my needs were simple enough that the solution wasn't that expensive, I'd go for a local hard drive array backup, and a remote network backup.
That last one is, in fact, the backup system I use at home. I have a cheap RAID array, and a script that encrypts my most important files and FTPs them to a friend's computer once a week. My important files are mostly source code and documents I've written myself - it doesn't chew through much bandwidth or storage space.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Mom & Dad
5GB at $0.20gb = $1.00 transfer fee
Monthly at $0.15gb = $.75/month recurring charge
$0.75 for a year is $9.00 dollars.
Throw some pictures up there, taxes, and other essentials using a third party program that "helps" you gather what really should be stored in case of emergency (can you say this program might be a good idea for someone in the open-source community?)
Far better than what they have now and its safe from fire. Throw a little encryption through that 3rd party app accessing the Amazon storage and it would be secure.
The difference here is that I used numbers I expect of data that should be backed rather than just dumping stuff on the drives because its there. The amount of stuff people just dump on drives for backup is amazing and wasteful.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.