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Comment by redskyluan | Hacker News Reader

this is much cheaper than S3 glacier. Any explanation on how to keep data safe?

Any explanation on how to keep data safe?

Start by not using an unknown provider with questionable reliability or stability where the only contact is an email address.

I think you're forgetting the cost parameter—obviously no provider can guarantee either reliability or stability

They can and they do - and if they fail, they cover damages.

Is there a provider that would cover the customer's damages like interruption of business? There are some insurance companies at least that do similar things.

A SLA would. I would just use multiple backups. One self-hosted on-premise and two off-site. Then the two off-site can have egress costs. Wouldn't matter. The self-hosted one would be the primary one to backup from. And it is going to be solid, usually. For example, a Synology NAS would suffice.

I think nearly all SLAs just give you discounts on the service's bill.

Eg if your service vendor costs you 1000/month and they have a 10-day outage and you lose 10000000, they will credit you 1000 best-case, or maybe 1/3 of that (since it was up most of the month).

> if they fail, they cover damages

Umm, most providers' standard T&Cs exclude liability for indirect or consequential loss following unavailability of their service.

I'm sorry, S3 insures your data in case of loss? How come they don't ask the value of what you're storing then?

I'd rather pay a little more money to a reputable vendor, honestly. If I depend on the backup, I want a reasonable guarantee they will deliver on their promise.

We keep 3 copies of your data - two on LTO drives (across two different locations) and one on enterprise grade hard drives.

Well now I know it's fake. LTO drives might be a few bucks per TB but enterprise grade hard drives sure aren't.

In different locations?

Different data centers

That sounds like a no.

Where are the data centers located?

How is this much cheaper? S3 glacier deep archive costs 0,00099 € per GB and month.

Did it ever get revealed how glacier works? I had heard they were using DVD-Rs back in the day, but that was a decade ago and a big price drop.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

I know the link is LTO based for some of it. Is LTO really cheaper than hard drives? Or is it just that LTO has automation equipment behind it?

It's interesting to me that hard drives have dropped 56% in cost since 2017, and yet I don't think storage prices have dropped anything like that. Per the article, it's because demand allows them to keep it high.

I welcome a price war! And thanks for the honesty Backblaze.

I dont believe aws have ever said.

My long held suspicion is they designed the product slos/apis to allow for the underlying storage technology to change without customers being aware, hence its clearly inspired by tape access patterns.

Possibly some of the very largest aws regions use tape libraries.

But I suspect aws co-mingles the data with S3 and just wears the cost. They've been known to price below cost (eg lambda implementation before firecracker) to corner the market.

I have a fairly optimized backup to glacier strategy involving a couple of days of soak time in S3 before moving to glacier with lifecycle rules to avoid the 180 day min storage for transient files. Net I end up paying about $1.20 to $1.50 per TB per month. Restoration of my data set would cost around $100/TB though. So a straight $1/TB would be a nice savings on a good month, and a great savings if my house ever burns down and I need to restore.

Backblaze is 6$/TB/month with no egress fee, and are a well established company with a good reputation:

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing

I'm surprised the don't come up more in a discussion about backup storage.

It doesn’t? From my experience it comes up every time S3 is mentioned, except maybe recently Cloudflare took the spotlight.

No egress fees make a huge cost difference if you ever need your archived data back.

That has retrieval fees as well as minimum storage times.

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