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."
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?
Upload truecrypt files
Open source, cross-platform, creates a strongly encrypted file that the program can mount as a real HD, you can mount it on any platform, does transparent encryption (for example in WinXP, it mounts itself with a drive letter, you can throw stuff in directly just as if it were a real drive, and it encrypts as it goes in)
http://www.truecrypt.org/
You can do it in say N meg chunks or something, I guess you'd have to create a new truecrypt partition every time, but I don't really know much about it, just tried it out and it seems neat
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
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.
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$... Still cheaper than this HDD that I didn't even get a year ago, on sale, for 200$)
Um, you should look at hard drive prices of today if you're going to be comparing server prices of today. Even retail prices put a 160 GB hard drive at $120. If you are willing to count the rebate price of that drive (it was at the top of the list; I didn't choose it because of the rebate explicitly), it's $50. That's 80 cents and 31 cents per gig respectively. Even if you count just the 100 GB, with rebate that's only 50 cents/gig. In under 4 months that way you'll break even.
Besides, whatcha gonna do? Run your programs remotely? Run your OS over the internet? I don't think so. You'd need a local mirror anyway, so you'd need that new hard drive.
This service has a lot of use, but from a backup standpoint I do NOT think it's at all a good option. Too expensive and too much hassle transferring that much data to make it worth it. (Are you really going to upload 100 gig? Even at a sustained rate of 150 KB/s upload (quite good from my experience over cable) that'd take over a week.)
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.
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.
]{
Users with data like yours also had the following data...
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
Quickplacer, the fastest robot in the world
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.