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Comment by cwbrandsma | Hacker News Reader

House burns down/cave collapses -- all pictures gone. Which is how most people run anyway.

Personally, I'm using Amazon Cloud Drive for storing pictures.

Backup software that locally encrypts data before sending it off to a remote location helps with that problem. I use Arq to backup my photos to S3, but I would feel comfortable to just store all photos unencrypted in iCloud.

I just discovered yesterday that I seem to have lost lots of Arq backups. I downgraded from Yosemite to Mavericks and the only backups Arq shows me are from after the downgrade.

I'll dive into this this weekend, I _really_ hope I didn't lose the actual files, just the indexes.

Although I haven't implemented it yet, the full plan would be to store the external drive off-site. Granted, that's a much larger inconvenience.

Of course cloud storage provides more convenient redundancy, but would it be completely safe to rely on it 100%? Is there no scenario under which Apple or Amazon could end up contacting you to say "Sorry, we lost your data and cannot recover it"? It is very unlikely, but so is your house burning down.

I can't speak to Apple, but I know for a fact that AWS' claimed 11 nines SLA (99.999999999%) for S3 is purely theoretical - in practice, they've never lost an object yet.

Fair point, but it only takes 1 failure for a catastrophe. I suppose my question would be: is cloud-storage alone enough?

I've read differently...

> Yes. On 12-21-12 Amazon notified us that 4 of our files (out of hundreds of millions) were lost due to a bug encountered while performing some sort of migration. 2 are gone forever and 2 are truncated forever. I've been using S3 for several years at Mixbook and Smule before that--this is the first loss I've experienced.

http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl...

Untrue, S3 does (extremely rarely) lose objects.

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