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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."
I wonder how long it'll take to build a backup solution that encrypts your data locally with a private key before sending it off to amazon. That way they wouldn't be able to look through it, and at 15c/month/gig it'd be pretty affordable for home backups
It's good to see more sites adding APIs to their web services (Amazon already has other web services, as does Yahoo and Google of course). It's becoming even easier for "mere mortals" to link together new technologies to make innovative new systems, but I wonder if this reliance on third-party systems comes at a cost, perhaps to reliability or security?
With virtually no cost for this storage, they can make a killing charging $0.15/Gig/month.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The Department of Homeland Security announced it has started a data hosting service. They encourage backing up of family pictures, journals, and irc chats, among other things. There is no monthly cost, but encrypters need not apply. When questioned on how this is a good use of taxpayers money, they simply replied that they wanted material to test their new indexing algorithms on.
Apply now at database.dhs.gov/personal/suspects/index.php
DYWYPI?
This is an interesting case of diversification. Amazon, no longer content to be the middle man e-tailer, is shifting it's weight into Google's territory with a service-based profit model. If this trend continues at Amazon, I have to wonder if Google will make a hostile bid for its newfound competitor.
Here is a Link to EPIC, a speculative piece on the future of media, including the GoogleZon segment.
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
Google has NOT been ordered to "hand over all the search data". Google has not been ordered to do anything in fact. The judge has hinted that he intends to give the government a random sampling of the websites Google has indexed, but not individual search terms.
c le/2006/03/14/AR2006031401519.html
As far as the government wanting a pile of businesses data bases to search for porn or what not, that is simply illegal and would result in a prompt judicial smack down. If they want to know what is on someone's serve, they need to do it the old fashion way, with a search warrant... well, in theory at least. The executive branch these days seems to consider search warrants as being optional.
As tempting as it is to go off topic on the case of the executive branch ignoring warrant laws, I'll just drop a link and declare both parties worthless and pathetic.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
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.
Since this is nothing more than an API to access data, I wonder if this couldn't be used as the backend storage for existing file storage services, instead of paying for servers and bandwidth yourself...
This limits costs to storage actually used (at $0.15/GB which is a very fair rate), and bandwidth actually used. The cost that could add up is the bandwidth, where you'd obviously have to direct users to the amazon URL directly to avoid using bandwidth to get the file then to pass it on too.
Plus, at $0.20/GB of bandwidth, upload/download could get expensive still, with no cap on that cost. For example, 2,000 GB of bandwidth, which is bundled with most low-end dedicated servers nowadays (ie. even the sub-$99/mo. machines), this would cost you $400 from Amazon. That's pretty steep, and may be the limiting factor making it unfeasible for this idea. Interesting nonetheless.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
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.
While $0.15/Gb/month is reasonable, the poster fails to mention Amazon will also charge $0.20/Gb on transfer. So while you will pay $15/month for your 100 Gb pr0n collection, you will also pay $20 to upload it, and a further $20 to download the whole lot to your cube-buddy's computer.
From TFA: "Apart from the storage fee, you pay $0.20 per gigabyte transferred, but there are no minimum fees and no setup costs, so you pay as you go."
Still, not bad - but the economics for the home user are a little less ideal than first reported.
In general you might think that the cost per gig you pay and the cost per gig that Amazon pays is similar. And you would be right. But to obtain high reliability you will pay more.
Amazon, or anybody who tries to build a large distributed storage service, can spread out the probability of disk errors over a larger set of users than you are able to do. The marginal cost to replace a disk that has failed, on a per user basis, is therefore lower for Amazon.
Moreover, the overhead to manage many disks does not increase linearly to the number of disks. Put another way, their per user cost to manage the disks is lower than you.
The cost equation is less about purchasing the storage than maintaining it through the inevitable failures over time. This makes the gigabyte-based usage cost very fair, since it is proportional to the rate of error. The access cost manages their bandwidth expense.
What I would like from a service like this is a pricing guarantee -- if they maintain the same pricing two years from now, it will be a ripoff given the diminishing cost of storage and bandwidth. It would be nice to have it pegged to some kind of disk/bandwidth industry index.
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.
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This isn't flaimbait. It's true. What happened yesterday on the floor of the senate is a good reason to be afraid of warrantless search. Right now the only people standing between your private data and the executive branch are Google and Feingold.
Users with data like yours also had the following data...
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
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.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
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.
So what?
I don't understand why people don't automatically distrust the security of any data not under their direct control. Data held by anyone else could be (mis)used by someone you don't want using it - be it a government agency, an employee causing trouble, a naughty contractor, a script kiddie who got access to something he shouldn't have access to, or any one of a million other people or groups.
If you have sensitive data, you should be taking steps to ensure the protection and integrity of that data, no matter what you're doing with it. Encryption is the most obvious solution, although it's not the answer for every situation.
1. Use $150,000,000 to request an exabyte of information for a month.
2. Proceed to write internet worm that does a distributed upload of random garbage.
3. Amazon is unable to satisfy your requests since no one has ever produced an exabyte.
4. Demand Amazon pay you back damages with a multiple of your original investment.
5. Profit!
I rub my hands together in evil dictatorial glee. Mwahahahaha.
It seems like this new service would be best for offsite backup of prescious data.
However, it isn't all that cost-effective. A local disk is very cheap comparatively, but (as a friend of mine found out) if someone steals your computer, they steal your backup too.
Are there any services out there which connects people with reasonable connections over long distances to back-up eachothers data? I'd be willing to get a new 80GB drive and make it available via a private FTP server if someone else would do the same for me.
Or are there cheaper offsite solutions than Amazon's?
The ______ Agenda
Today's your lucky day.
(Probably NSFW)
I was hoping for a bookshelf. I wanted a somewhere to store my books and all I got was this lousy online file store.
Quickplacer, the fastest robot in the world
Amazon supports BitTorrent for the storage. Does that mean they run the tracker? Interesting way to save on transfer fees that
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.
It looks like Amazon managed to get their storage product out before the rumored Google Drive (TechCrunch article, Slashdot article). I wonder how Amazon's product will compare to Google's, whenever Google's is released. I'm particularly interested in seeing how Amazon and Google will end up competing with each other in terms of price and transfer speeds.
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.
Where is the best place to get write-only media?
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not with any of the recent tape formats. They're all "serpentine" - That is, a very narrow track (up to 1/512 of the width of the tape) goes from the start to the end of the tape. The head then moves down a fraction, and writes the next track "backwards".
This means that the seek time is reduced by up to 512x. Of course, this isn't free - Tape wear is increased since there are many, many more passes over the tape.
Running .15 per Gig plus .20 per Gig transfer is not very economical for power users, nor very practical (upload speeds etc) This is pretty well covered.
However..for the typical end user that can barely patch their machine, , may or may not understand to renew their virus definitions adn only use their computer to store digital pictures of their grandkids this is a good service. I often wonder how many grandparents lose their photo collection everytime a hard disk crashes (3-5 years at most) because i doubt more than 1% of home users run a raid array.
Yep, better choices, flickr etc but which allows them to be hosted and send links to friends but nice to have a generic service. Amazon "catering to the unsophisticated". got a ring to it :)
Let's take a 300GB System that needs to be backed up:
900GB at $0.20/gb = $180.00 transfer fee
Monthly at $0.15/gb = $135.00/month recurring charge
Weekly incremental of 30GB = $6.00/wk = $24/mo recurring charge
So $180.00 + $159/month = $2088 just for the first year, plus whatever you have to pay your ISP for abusive bandwidth charges.
Let's look at it from another perspective:
4 WD3200SD 320GB Raid-Edition SATA Drives: About $600
1 4-Port SATA Raid Card: About $250
Expected Lifetime: 5 years
So, buying a whole other raid-5 array to mirror your 900GB of stuff costs nearly $10K to store for 5 years on Amazon versus $850 to store locally. Hell, even if you were paranoid and replaced one of the hard disks every 3 months, you'd still be at less than half the cost.
I won't even get into which is more secure. If it's not on your site or some place you have physical control over, it is not secure.
so, $0.15 per GB/month storage, $0.20 per GB transferred.
questions: how do i put a cap on my storage (and more importantly transfer) so a runaway service doesn't screw me?
MORTAR COMBAT!
If you follow this link, you'll notice that they are supporting bit torrent.
Consider.
If by "cross platform," you mean "Windows XP/2000/2003 and Linux."
Call me back when it runs on OS X.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
From the terms of service...
2) You may make calls at any time that the Amazon Web Services are available, provided that you either: (i) do not exceed 1 call per second per IP address, or send files greater than 40K; or (ii) do not exceed the limits set forth in the Service Terms for a particular Service. If you build and release an Application, the stated limitations apply to each installed copy of the Application.
I've tried Allmydata in the past and had some success. They use a peer-to-peer system to back your files up. The free plan requires a 10:1 ratio (you share 10 megs, you get 1 meg). Not bad if you have a lot of free drive space sitting there doing nothing. I think it uses bittorrent as its transfer method but I can't remember exactly how it works and the web page is short on details.
I just got the most recent version (1.3) and haven't played with it much but the last one I had a lot of trouble with, sometimes files wouldn't upload, it was hard to tell if the program was actually working or if it had died, and it seemed like it couldn't remember which files I had chosen to persistently back up.
Still in beta though, but interesting if they can get the kinks worked out.
This is true.
Actually on a Mac what you can do is make a free-floating encrypted Sparse image. It's the same way that the OS handles FileVault encrypted home folders. It's superior to just making an encrypted DMG, because it's readable and writable like a regular filesystem, plus it can expand and contract depending on what's stored in it.
It doesn't have the steganographic or deniability benefits of Truecrypt, but it's good encrypted storage. (Plus if you're ultra-paranoid you can put it inside your FileVault encrypted home folder, so that the data on disk is encrypted twice.) Plus I don't think you need to be an Administrator to do it, so it could be useful if you only have a user account on a system and don't trust the person with the master password.
The only "trick" is that Disk Copy will not make one, you need to do it from the Terminal with hdiutil.
% hdiutil create SecureSparse -size 5g -encryption -type SPARSE -fs HFS+ -volname SecureImage
Where "SecureImage" is the name of the file you want to create and 5GB is the maximum size (which is not necessarily the space it will take on disk).
There are a few caveats though. You can't share it with someone who doesn't have a Mac, hdiutil is not open source and there is not to my knowledge a Linux version, and I'm not sure what happens if you try to copy it to a FAT filesystem and back. I've copied one to a Linux fileserver (EXT2) and back and it seemed to survive okay, but I have always been told to use caution when moving sparse files around.
(I originally learned about this procedure from this page, so all credit to them.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."