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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how slow you'd be willing to go.

Would you be willing to pay $1 for 100GB if it meant waiting 15 minutes to load your tape? How about 30 minutes?

For some data, I could wait a week. I take pictures and movies that take up a lot of space; I don't want to ever lose them but they are not mission critical in any way, shape or form.

I store everything on a NAS + another NAS as backup; it's a fairly safe setup as long as my house doesn't burn down, isn't flooded or burglarized.

I would love an offsite backup solution that would be cheap because of very slow reads: if my house burns down it'll be some time before I can access those backups anyway.

Couldn't agree more. please notify me if you found a solution

Yes, that's exactly the kind of service I'd like to see. A small number of days to access the data is fine.

Yes. If I could pay $10/TB/month, request a list of files via API, and be notified via webhook when I could retrieve them (and therefore, retrieve them while they're cached on spinning media for 24 hours), I'd definitely do it. I've got tons of video, pictures, and music to back up, and I don't need immediate access to backups.

I was looking into your problem. Just out of curiosity: even if you produce 100GB per day, what stops you from purchasing a 3TB (compressed) tape[1] for $54 and do backups on your own and store cassette offsite in your secure deposit box (some banks give those for free, or $30/year)

1: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16840999...

just trying to figure if there is any business behind your problem.

If a personal backup solution requires manual steps, it will eventually stop happening.

I've seen the tech side work. I worked at Fermilab on the USCMS side of the LHC for data taking; we had 5PB of spinning disk and tens of PB of tape in large automated tape silos with robotic arms on tracks. Data requested for processing from tape would be staged to disk, the job requesting the data would run, and then the data would be purged from disk after X hours/days.

It's easily done. Is there a business strategy behind it? Not sure.

Edit: I didn't answer your question. If I backup to tape and put the tape somewhere offline, I can't get access to it without a physical trip. I'm willing to trade access latency for lower cost, but I still want to move bits and not atoms.

I guess the problem is how to shoot 100GB in the cloud cheap and in reasonable time. this is the problem here.

> what stops you from purchasing a 3TB (compressed) tape[1] for $54 and do backups on your own

The tape device costs over $1000 - you would need more than 33TB of (uncompressed) storage space before that becomes worth it compared to buying hard disks and hot plugging them when needed.

$1 per 100GB per what? If it was per year I might do it, certainly not per month.

doing some initial calculation, it may be a ground for startup if you would be willing to pay $2.50/year for 100GB with first 10GB/year free download.

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