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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

Every few years or so I flirt with the idea of backing up to M-Disks. Then I remember how slow and low density they are.

For recording and forgetting, I recently played with LTO, again.

But I always end up at local HDD + remote AWS Glacier.

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I did do that. Box of disks, one weekend burning back to back, then going to a plot of land I buy from time to time in the middle of nowhere and burying it in a weatherproof metal capsule.

AWS Glacier is mostly just LTO done for you with exponentially less risk.

I’m sad they’re retiring Snowball soon, though.

The risk is they get bored and retire it / retention terms start to get iffy / they 100x prices.

Or their AI chatbot decides you smell funny and bans you forever with 0 chance of appealing to a human

Right thats the much more likely issue! Some Google-like reaction in the future where using service X (chat/mail/whatever) from Amazon results in being banned across an entire account which also happens to be the account you wrote all your data to AWS Glacier with for 30 years... oops!

I think the most realistic concern here is amazon scanning your backups. I totally get it. A lot of the reason for retaining total control over the storage medium is that what is being stored isn't strictly legal.

You should locally encrypt 100% of the information you store on someone else's system with strong symmetric encryption. In fact, I think Amazon's legal team would quietly prefer that you do this.

Dumping a bunch of bare files named things like:

  THE.ODYSSEY.2026.2160p.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.DV.HDR.H.265-GROUP.mkv

into S3 buckets is probably a bad idea.

Local encryption is not going to help 100 year recoverability

Preserving 256 bits is not that difficult.

I cant imagine many people are backing up movies/tv shows, certainly not ones readily available should a recovery be needed. I can understand more obscure shows but backing up something like The Odyssey would be a colossal waste of storage and money.

(But yes - regardless of what it is, encrypt it)

For a while Google Workspace didn't enforce the 5TB per user limit and eventually I had 50TB of suspiciously named backups (for real, you should see my DVD collection). Nothing came out of it except for the enforcement and the pain of moving everything elsewhere again.

Readily available isn't what it used to be, with optical media going extinct and licenses being in endless churn

I can assure you it is readily available online and always will be. And now that we've had confirmation you basically own nothing then it'll be more prominent than ever.

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