Hacker News Reader

Comment by twobat | Hacker News Reader

Storage is indeed cheap. Buying it through a service provider not so much.

It is still cheap, even when bought through a service provider, even after adding backup storage, and after adding any overhead incurred by having more data. True, it costs more than the $0.02/GB that a cheap, large spinning rust drive costs - perhaps a factor of 10 or 100 more, and perhaps billed monthly instead of as a capital expense.

It's cheap in comparison to the data that a business is saving. That's really expensive data. The people that created the data cost thousands of dollars per month. It would be stupid to save $0.02 if there's even a small chance that someone will need to spend $200 to rewrite a document or reverse engineer some information that they had in an email from a couple years ago. While some data - an installer for 3rd-party software, or photos/video - is pretty large, a single config file or code file that may have been perfected over months or years is just a couple kB, and it's hard to keep the latter useful without the former. And if a customer's $100,000 installation goes down for an extended period of time because you deleted their backup images to save space? You're not getting another order like that from them.

Talking to my IT department, it seems the argument is that storage is only cheap in isolation. In the real world it aggregates across products, users and hierarchies.

Example email:

- I want bigger mailbox to handle bigger mails incoming and outgoing. Result: bigger mailbox.

- Then everyone else in the company gets bigger mailboxes. Result: bigger mailbox x1000.

- Also: bigger mail-server backups.

- Also: bigger desktop/user-profile backups, because Outlook duplicates all this info locally.

- Also: bigger storage needs for anything also interacting/duplication selected mail (like CRM, import services, whatever).

- Also: bigger backups needed for all those systems.

- Etc etc.

And IMO it's a perfectly valid claim.

Maybe storage "only" costs $0.1 per 100GB in isolation (or whatever), but for a full company with all systems involved, in aggregate it quickly it may exceed 1000x that.

> - Then everyone else in the company gets bigger mailboxes. Result: bigger mailbox x1000.

This doesn't have to be so. Some users have genuine reasons to require more mailbox storage. Not everyone has the same needs. And if 1000 users really need more space, then either they should be given the space they require, or they're doing something wrong that can be solved by technical means (like sending links to large files instead of the files themselves).

> - Also: bigger desktop/user-profile backups, because Outlook duplicates all this info locally.

This can be configured to some extent.

> This doesn't have to be so. Some users have genuine reasons to require...

Indeed. Organisations cause them all sorts of problems by not allowing exceptions to the rules.

So your company refuses to spend...1000 x $0.1 = $100 to avoid deleting or dropping emails? That seems incredibly short-sighted.

That's a silly argument for something like bios files that would take up less than 0.1 to 1% of the size of current storage that they are maintaining and which will only grow. They're not backing up email and desktops here, we're talking about drivers and bios. It's like comparing grapes and watermelons.

Only asking because the price is already being multiplied by 'users' further down: where do one get 100 GB for $0.1 for mailbox storage?

But old stuff tends to be adorably small compared to new stuff. I doubt the sum total of intel’s legacy firmware update collection exceeds the capacity of a ten year old piece of spinning rust.

The torrent made by r/DataHoarders is under 400GB

Reply on news.ycombinator.com