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Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

> demonstrate that ... on a number of cloud platforms ... that their rates of data loss are significantly higher than your "home spun" storage

You seem to be missing the point.

People are not saying "don't use cloud storage at all"

They are saying "don't use cloud storage exclusively"

You might trust that your cloud providers will never be hacked, that your individual account on them will never be hacked, that they will never suffer a catastrophic failure, that they will never go out of business, that they will never be fully or intermittently down at the moment you need to retrieve some data, and so on and so forth, based on their claims and documentation, or that you won't cock up at some point and cause data loss in your account, but I prefer to have my own copy (or copies) as well as the ones that are "in the cloud". For truly essential data at least one of those copies is both offline and offsite.

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Unless you've personally memorized all the data in your head, you're trusting someone or something. Even if you've printed it all out on acid-free paper and stored it in a bank vault, you're trusting the bank, you're trusting your paper supplier, you're trusting the courier who transports it back and forth. If you've stored it on "your" servers you're still trusting your hard drive manufacturer, your RAID firmware, your OS code, your hosting company, your sysadmins.

For most values of "I have x hours and y dollars to safely store z gigabytes", a pure-cloud solution (possibly involving multiple independent cloud providers) has a lower chance of failure than one involving local storage.

>For truly essential data at least one of those copies is both offline and offsite.

But the fact remains that where ever you choose to put it "offline and offsite" the odds of it being lost are orders of magnitude greater then its persistent and redundant storage on a reputable cloud provider. Even if you put it on the most stable storage you can find and lock it in a underground safe. You can't guarantee its integrity a handful of years from now let alone centuries.

To put it in other words you are advocating storing your money in a mattress because you don't "trust the banks"

Maybe ask the people of Greece if they "trust the banks". Shit happens, a local copy of your stuff does no harm at all in the same way as some cash on the hip is cool in case your card stops working.

Do you keep your money in a shoe box under your bed or stuffed in your mattress? I'd hope no, but then that begs the question "where do you keep it?" I'd assume not in a bank because any bank can fail at any moment and they are only insured by an instutition as flaky at the United States Treasury department. Governments collapse all the time just ask the Soviet Union. Right?

The failure probabilities are relative. And everyone here is equivocating. As if the likelihood of failure is evenly dispersed. You indicate that storing customer data in the cloud is "playing fast and loose" but I'd argue the opposite. Not having a cloud backup is what is "fast and loose"

Imagine you are an independent bank. You need to move your customers deposits. Do you load sacks of cash into your corporate minivan or hire an armored car service? Well lets look closer. With the latter you are giving up control, right? You have no control over the quality measures an armored car service might take. Yet somehow not contracting them seems like foolishness. The reason is obvious. Its because you know in this case that transporting money isn't your expertise. Its not something you can focus adequate time and resources on perfecting. You also can't spread the risk of failure across a lot of customers, absorb that failure, and make your service better for the next go. The exact same logic applies to long term storage of data. If that isn't your only function its extremely hard to get it right.

I keep my money spread out across multiple accounts with multiple banks up to the insured limit. Because yes, banks can fail.

> You indicate that storing customer data in the cloud is "playing fast and loose" but I'd argue the opposite. Not having a cloud backup is what is "fast and loose"

Basic reading comprehension failure, that is not what GP is arguing.

He's arguing that if your live data lives in the cloud your backup copy should not be in the cloud and vice versa.

>I keep my money spread out across multiple accounts with multiple banks up to the insured limit.

Insured by who? Not governments. Governments collapse all the time. The only safe place to keep it is in your own custom bank at home that you built yourself.

And that money is worthless if the issuing government collapses. There is no ultimate security.

I'd assume not in a bank because any bank can fail at any moment and they are only insured by an instutition as flaky at the United States Treasury department. Governments collapse all the time just ask the Soviet Union. Right?

If you bank fails, you will be made whole with money from the FDIC. Money is fungible. Any money will do.

Data is not similarly fungible. There's no IT FDIC to replace your lost data with other data that's identical.

Oh you can't trust the FDIC they are government insured. And governments collapse all the time. I gave an example. Like a I said there is only one safe place for your money. Thats in your own private bank that you build and maintain yourself.

When is the last time the FDIC failed versus the last time an online storage vendor folded?

Its true that FDIC has lost fewer deposits than S3 has lost objects, but as usual there is a caveat. There are 2,000,000,000,000 objects in S3. In order to make a comparison the FDIC would have to insure over 300 deposits for every man, woman, and child on the planet and maintain a failure rate of '0.000000001%' or The FDIC would have to operate in its current state continuously for many millennia without interruption. I don't get a sense that the contrarians here appreciate the numbers involved.

You're evading.

When was the last time the FDIC failed versus the last time an online storage vendor folded?

Anybody who remembers nirvanix is going to have the willies just reading this thread, those who were caught by it will see red.

Personally I think the risk that AWS fails is remote, but if I were to store a bunch of data with them I'd most definitely make sure that I would not be dependent on them. It would be a convenience at best, but never a dependency.

> To put it in other words you are advocating storing your money in a mattress because you don't "trust the banks"

In this case, money can't be compared to digital data. You can make multiple copies of digital data on our own but not of your money tucked away into a mattress, that would be illegal.

It doesn't share the exact same properties, but you can make the comparison with any given copy. So yes the analogy holds.

You're entirely free to play fast and loose with your customers data.

It is interesting that even today there are still people arguing against having back-ups because 'the cloud', you'd think that we ITers learn from our mistakes but for some this has to be personal experience before the lessons are learned. Good luck if and when it happens to you, please re-read your comments here at that time. There isn't an IT person that I know that has not been saved by a back-up at some point in their career, the fact that you are lucky so far is not a reason to think you are exempt.

And no, nobody is advocating storing your money in a mattress because you 'don't trust the banks', the point is that you can keep a copy of your critical data for very little money to safeguard against an eventuality that seems to hit the IT world with alarming regularity, even if they use 'the cloud'. Fuck-ups, hacks, disgruntled employees and failures all happen, every day.

> To put it in other words you are advocating storing your money in a mattress because you don't "trust the banks"

Money and data are not directly compatible here, as one "bit" of money is the same as any other in most respects, but I do always carry a minimum amount of cash in case my cards stop working or are lost/stolen, have a pot of "emergency cash" at home for similar reasons, and recommend others do the same. Most of my money is in the bank so I'm not protecting against massive institutional failure here, but I am protecting myself against a variety of possible temporary inconveniences and possible mistakes on my part.

I'd rather have two backups of which one is more likely to fail then the other than just one, or three rather than two, and mixing types of backups means not all of them are subject to exactly the same failure modes (my local backups, online or off, are unaffected by connectivity issues for instance). For data that is important, a little paranoia is healthy IMO.

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