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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

I don't think he really was "burned".

Paying 87c a month for a couple of years, then 52c a month for a few more years, to back up 60+GB, and then getting a one off fee of $150 still averages out at around $2/mo. Hardly getting shafted.

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Depends on your budget. If you don't have $150 disposable income to blow on a screwup, it's an expensive mistake.

It's like getting a parking ticket for parking somewhere you've unknowingly been parking illegally for years. Yeah, if you average it out, it's cheap. But having to stump up the cash still hurts.

That's definitely a valid counterpoint, agreed.

60Gig is what - maybe 200 CDs losslessly compressed? That's a couple of grand's worth of disposable income he entrusted to Amazon and his own management skills (assuming he no longer has access to the original disks to re-rip them (and ignoring the copyright implications of that)).

I guess he always had Linus's backup strategy open to him - "Only wimps use music backups: real men just upload their important tunes on Bittorrent, and let the rest of the world seed it ;)"

Meta, Response to sub-comments[meta enough yet?]: Ah, that makes way more sense. Sorry for labelling the parent a troll. This was clearly my mistaken interpretation. It was weird. As I tried to check out the math on the parent's assertions, they came out an order of magnitude too high like 3 times in a row. So I concluded that the parent was intentionally inflating the relevant costs to misdirect the discussion. However, it was really just my failure to consider the perspective of the parent, aligned with a loose enough situation that the mistake was possible. Again, I apologize for the misapplied label. I'll leave the original comment below so as not to rewrite history on how I was (due to sincere misunderstanding, I maintain) kind of a jerk :/

A couple grand? 500GB hdds have been less than $100 for a long time now, certainly since before Amazon Glacier was a product.

Just because you can formulate a large valuation for something doesn't mean that it's a reasonable valuation.

Even $10/cd is a ridiculous estimate of the cost of blank CDs. If you insisted on using blank CDs for backup, you could do 200 CDs for $40.

Edit: And what are CDs... 640mb? that's like 12 CDs, not 200... I'm realizing that I've fallen into a troll trap...

Meta: I guess I'll leave this comment up as a cautionary tale.

Just in case you are confused, the person above you is talking about the cost of the music ON the CD, not the CD itself.

Indeed. I'm guessing 200-ish albums, purchased at ~$10 each, would take up 60G when losslessly compressed. (As pointed out, 640MB/disk would mean just under 100 "full" audio CDs as bit for bit copies, so 200 is probably a quite low estimate).

I bought my ~3000 disc CD collection here in Australia, many of them still have price stickers of $30 and more on them. While CDs were "a thing" here, I figure I spent about a quarter of a cheap house on them. (I don't regret a cent though. I'm also "that guy" who thinks "You only had 60Gig of music to back up? Wow!", but is mostly socially-aware enough to keep that sort of reaction to himself.)

> If you insisted on using blank CDs for backup, you could do 200 CDs for $40.

Wouldn't 2 x 100GB Blu-ray discs be better for the same price? Less physical storage space required and less time to burn the data.

FWIW, no offence taken, an understandable mistake to make given my lack of clarity.

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