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Comment by dmoo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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