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Comment by quinndupont | Hacker News Reader

My 350GB of music is backed up on Backblaze (a wonderful service), but seeing those visualizations reminded me of the environmental impact of my digital packratting. That's a sizable data center keeping my data happy and backed up.

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I wonder how many thousands of people are paying them to back up stuff they could easily redownload. Great business model if they de-dupe internally.

If you're implying they are crazy for doing so, have you ever lost everything and tried to redownload it all? It's a huge timesink, I tell you.

As for de-duping, Dropbox does this. When you drop a Windows ISO or the Office installer into your folder, it hashes the file and realizes 'hey we already have this!' and you don't have to upload it.

they encrypt all data and i dont think it would be wise of them analyzing their clients data for dupes...if somebody would get to know that their business would be gone.

ZFS supports encryption with deduplication, and Dropbox does dedupe accross customers (and why not? It's not a human digging through things).

http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/compress_encrypt_checksum_... - ZFS link

When different customers use different key to encrypt the data, even if the source is the same, the outcome is different. So it is not feasible to do de-duplication across different customers' data, unless all of them use the same key.

Off topic, but what do you listen to that takes up 350GB? Is everything in FLAC?

A fair collection of (DJ) mixes (live or not) and sets can easily account for a few hundred gigabytes. Take Tiesto's "Club Life" and Armin Van Buurin's "A State of Trance" for example. With each set being around two hours or more of high quality mp3, with the former having over 300 episodes, and the latter having around a hundred. These things add up quickly.

I listen to a lot of music (from all genres). I only purchase/download full albums (even if most of the songs are not very good), and only listen to at least 196k MP3 (most are at least 256k or higher). Some are Apple Lossless (converted from FLAC). And throw in a few discographies in there and all of a sudden you have 350GB. I've discovered that I add about 50GB/6 months.

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