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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

It seems unnecessarily exposed to an event affecting Marco's home - fire, burglary, natural disaster etc. It would appear more prudent to back up to a cloud location. Either, as he mentions, S3, or a VPS somewhere.

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The problem with backing up with S3 is that if you ever stop paying for S3 you lose your backups. If you get sick for a month and your bank balance goes negative, or the IRS takes control over your account for something, there go your backups. I find that to be way more scary and likely than losing all of my DVD backups.

The cost of storage on Amazon is very low - roughly $3 per month for Marco's 22GB.

I imagine most people running a company would have a separate corporate account linked to a credit card, so that personal circumstances have less of a major effect month to month.

It doesn't matter how much it costs. I still don't want to lose my backups due to financial circumstances. I would say a fire destroying multiple safe places to store a backup (i.e., leaving a flash drive or DVD at my partner's home) is a lot less likely than financial mishap.

The solution to this then seems to be that Amazon should allow for you to prepay for AWS credit so one does not need to worry about their bank accounts suddenly being frozen, or some other mishap, just that they have X months of runaway in AWS credit for typical S3 charges.

That would be fantastic. They could also give you a discount for large deposits; i.e., deposit 3X your average monthly usage and save 5%.

Another issue is that your S3 credentials are stored on your primary server. An attacker who gains access to that machine will also gain access to off site backups, and can completely destroy your business.

I was under the impression that using S3's versioned object support, it's possible to set up an account that has the ability to write objects but not to delete previous versions.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_does_Versioning_protect_m...

See also the followup question:

Q: How can I ensure maximum protection of my preserved versions?

Versioning’s MFA Delete capability, which uses multi-factor authentication, can be used to provide an additional layer of security. By default, all requests to your Amazon S3 bucket require your AWS account credentials. If you enable Versioning with MFA Delete on your Amazon S3 bucket, two forms of authentication are required to permanently delete a version of an object: your AWS account credentials and a valid six-digit code and serial number from an authentication device in your physical possession

I agree completely. It doesn't seem wise, legally, to store one's business backups at home. Whether my thoughts are warranted or not I have no idea, but I'd just pay the small S3 fee and be on with it.

One of his earlier tweets that led to this article suggests it's not just backed up at his home:

“I should blog about Instapaper's backup setup sometime. It's pretty extensive. A lot of places would need to burn down to lose your data.”

Maybe he just likes having a complete copy of the production data on his local development instance? Great for local data ming too.

I agree with that.. Kinda expected a better setup for a real business.

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