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I know Amazon says they have 11 9s, but merely given that there have been 5 mass extinction events in the past 500M years, you probably can't do better than 8 9s. (11 9s gives you even odds that your data will last 70 billion years, as long as you pay Amazon's fee.)

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You're probably right that Amazon holds your data for as long as that, however, there's another way to look at 11 nines: If you upload one hundred billion (10^11) files on Glacier, you expect to lose one of them per year, and not more. That's probably realistically achievable.

Compare this with S3, where you will lose 1 in one billion files per year. Shocking!

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