Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

For the majority of consumers, cloud backup makes more sense than tape backup -- few people have the discipline to stick to a safe backup regimen.

View on HN

I was thinking that having a separate medium for backup might make people think about it differently.

Cloud backup eliminates local disaster data loss. Which is amazing. It also introduces counter party risk, e.g. Google style service shutdown with 30-90 days to download your data or even a Megaupload like shutdown.

Isn't that only a serious risk if you are using it as cloud storage as opposed to cloud backup? If you're using it for backup, your only risk is that you won't have a backup for some period of time during/after a shut-down, until you have uploaded your local copy to a new provider.

Cloud backup will never work for 8T of data :-)

With a gigabit internet connection, it would take about a day to backup 8TB. 100mbit could do it in 222 hours. At 10mbit, about 90 days.

Most non tech savvy people don't even have that much data to backup: most of their heavy stuff (music, pictures, etc), are now attached to an online service.

Plus you only do it once. Differential backup would take down the size of the next backups to a few Gb, or even Mb.

It turns out that actual throughput on nominal "gigabit" consumer ISP connections ranges from 0-95% of the branding. It is only safe to consider them as "may burst as high as 980 Mb/s" and to actually test your connections to any given destination. Oversubscription and the resulting congestion are assumed into the consumer ISP model.

Even assuming that a consumer "gigabit" connection is actually delivering that speed, you also have bottlenecks in the wire protocol (sftp or scp or https or whatever) and the storage service. It would take me longer than a day to copy 8T to the archive storage within my own data center using HSI (an ftp-like utility for accessing HPSS storage).

Last year I took a subscription to Backblaze, (incidentally) I have around 8TB of data, I have a gigabit upload (a real one), but Backblaze servers are on the other side of the planet for me. It took around 3 or 4 months to upload it all.

That's to say, there's more to it than upload speed, if Backlaze had servers in Europe I'd recommend it much more than I do.

What about another 3 or 4 months to download a restore?

The core data that I'd want to restore immediately if I lost my primary fileserver is only around 100GB or less

I have several TB's of other data (mostly photos, videos, etc) that I'm fine waiting for weeks or months for if needed, but if you're in a hurry, Backblaze will sell you a hard drive that they restore your backup to and mail it to you.

At that point, one might as well just wind it off to a hard disk in the first place, then store it offsite.

Then I'd need multiple hard drives for redundancy, and I have to bring them back and read them regularly to make sure the data is all readable. And while I have a large amount of data that I rarely touch, I have a small amount that changes frequently, so I need to include that data in my off-site backup too.

Or I could just sign up for a cloud backup service, spend a month or so uploading my initial snapshot of data, and then backups are automatic and always offsite, replicated, and scrubbed. For $10/month.

EnTouch limits me to 1tb / month on gigabit fiber

+ $400/yr for storage. A few hard drives, DVDs, and tapes are much cheaper and pretty easy (even if you have to pay $500 once to get an IT pro's help.)

HDD need regular replacements if you want them to work in 30 years. It's cheaper than 400$/year, but not as much as you might think especially if you want to ensure 3 copies of each piece of data.

Got about 25TB with crashplan so far. It is slow to upload, but I am slowly getting the 35TB and counting uploaded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com