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Comment by HaloZero | Hacker News Reader

Could someone explain the benefit of backing up to S3 as opposed to just a service like Mozy, Backblaze, or Dropbox?

As with AWS, it's a gamble as to whether it will be there when you need it. I'm always nervous of all-you-can-eat plans. All it takes is a small estimate mistake to blow an entire business plan.

N.B. I've been using Arq since it first came out, and love it 100%. I do not, however, backup my music/video with it. That goes on a removable 2TB safe in a fire safe.

It's probably a little cheaper, plus you have slightly more control over it.

I think Backblaze offers unlimited for $6/month, Mozy offers 125GB for $10/month.

That same pricing $0.140 per GB (on S3) is $17.5/month unless I misunderstand S3 pricing.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

http://mozy.com/home/pricing/

https://secure.backblaze.com/buy.htm

Dropbox is more expensive but is syncing as opposed to backup.

I don't think you misunderstand S3's pricing. They're not cheap. What they are is flexible, generally-high-availability, and you can choose the region you want to serve out of. For sheer storage costs, they're moderately high, same as their EC2 costs for sheer compute power.

... which is why it's inappropriate for a desktop backup solution. The chances of simultaneously losing your hard drive AND the entire RAID array in the Backblaze container that stores your data are so small that it's not worth paying extra.

If Backblaze loses your data and it's your only backup, you need to re-upload all your data. If that takes a long time and your hard drive fails during that time, you lose your data.

(disclosure: I wrote Arq)

I think with remote backups, a 2-part backup is probably the best strategy. Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner on an external hard drive, and remote backups with Arq, or BackBlaze, or Carbonite, or whatever.

It's possible to lose your S3 data too (and then you're in the same situation as BackBlaze losing your data). For example, I once accidentally removed all permissions from files in a bucket with Transmit, including the permissions to read files or set permissions.

I think Arq is great, just playing devil's advocate.

Looking at the s3 breakdown of what you get for $5/month, standard s3 ($5/0.014 ~= 36GB) or reduced redundancy ($5/0.094 ~= 53GB) not including rest requests and traffic, backblaze begins looking like quite a deal. $3.96/month for unlimited backup storage for one computer seems hard to beat.

Agreed, I wouldn't want to backup my entire laptop on s3. But since the first 5GB on Amazon's s3 are free, I find it's a great way to keep an extra backup of my current projects.

The major issue seems to be that Arq is able to backup and restore all HFS+ metadata, which several other online backup services don’t. You can test your’s using Backup Bouncer: http://www.n8gray.org/blog/2007/04/27/introducing-backup-bou...

The data is also encrypted with your own key. I know that's an option with at least one of those Mozy or Backblaze apps but definitely not with Dropbox.

Backblaze encrypts your data with your own key, but you can't restore your data unless you give Backblaze your key. When you restore, step 1 is to enter your key into their web page. Also, if you order a hard drive with your files, the hard drive is shipped with your unencrypted files on it.

(I'm the author of Arq)

Speaking of which, does Arq 2 have support for AWS Import/Export?

Not yet. It's on my to-do list.

I'm quite a bit more confident of Amazon's ability to stick around long-term than a couple of startups.

FWIW, Mozy has been owned by Fortune 500 company EMC since 2007.

Yeah, because big Fortune 500 companies never kill off their expensively acquired products lines. Motorola, anyone?

HP ;)

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