Hacker News Reader

Comment by willtim | Hacker News Reader

A huge shame. I backup my optical media to S3, but I also use M-DISC "mineral discs" which hopefully will last much longer. Sadly they were not available back then.

View on HN

Do you mind sharing your monthly S3 bill and it’s rate of change?

It's around 10 dollars, but then I have less than 1 TB. I recently starting backing up my RAW files remotely, so this number is set to increase significantly (!) I am very interested in S3 alternatives. I haven't looked at the Amazon Glacier options either, but I suspect the retrieval times make it awkward to query/verify backups.

Thank you. My pleasure and problem is my spouse is a professional photographer ;)

I can recommend wasabi.com, they are a lot less expensive but also offer a full S3 api.

But do you want to trust a company you never heard of (in my case) over one that every big company relies on with your backups to safe a couple of bucks / month?

Yes. People get burned every day by well known big companies.

Side note: I’ve heard about Wasabi for a long time; they actively advertise on APMs Marketplace audio program about how much cheaper they are then S3 for storage and transfer. Backblaze B2 would’ve also been an acceptable alternative to S3.

> Yes. People get burned every day by well known big companies.

Usually from free or niche products of well known big companies. S3 will probably not be deprecated over night without a appropriate notice period as half the internet depends on it in some way as you can see on S3 outages.

I used to use S3 but quickly realized how expensive it is and switched to Hetzner. The more data you need to store and transfer, the more pronounced the difference is.

Long-term archival / storage is not the use case for S3, that'd be more Glacier or B2's thing.

The storage itself is competitive with Hetzner's storage solutions (nextcloud or storage box), though you'd pay for traffic on top of that.

Glacier is wonderful. I am able to store basically everything I want and it costs me less than $1/mo

The cost in glacier is if you ever need to retrieve data

Right which is free for the first 10GB each month and then is $0.01 per GB after that for standard retrieval.

What's Hetzner's redundancy like?

I rent a 40 TB box with Hetzner set up as a 2x20TB RAID1 paying €78. I can be sure I won't pay more than that each month. With S3, I can be sure I'd pay at least $560 each month for 20 TB plus the traffic - and this made frequent synchronization pretty unattractive to me. So far their service was very reliable, with hard drives failing a couple of years, but they were replacing them very quickly (half an hour or so) so for me the availability of Hetzner is quite close to what I had with S3 - but I sleep better at night.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com