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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Even ignoring labor, none of these analyses ever consider BC/DR or backup costs.

S3 for backups is the single biggest ease-of-mind feature AWS provides, IMO. I do not want all my data sitting in a single colocation facility without backups.

If I run a database on RDS, maybe it costs more than a bare-metal server, but I can replicate the automatic hourly backups to as many regions as I want. Incredible peace of mind over a self-managed facility.

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"S3 for backups is the single biggest ease-of-mind feature AWS provides, IMO. I do not want all my data sitting in a single colocation facility without backups."

I'm biased, but in my opinion if your infrastructure is on AWS and your backups are on AWS you're doing it wrong. Even accounting for zones and geo-disparity, etc.

Luckily:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone s3:/some/bucket /rsync.net/home

... which is made possible by rclone[1], which is excellent, and the fact that rsync.net has rclone built into the remote environment[2] such that you can execute it over SSH.

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html

Those are included in our colo costs with a second data center where we have a smaller DR cluster.

It never fails to amaze me how many HN contributors don't seem to read the linked articles yet seem compelled to tell you off for things you've already accounted for, explained and justified.

There's absolutely nothing in the article (which I did read) about it. If you yourself had read the article, you would know that it was not explained, accounted for, or justified.

There is a single vague reference to a "primary DC". There is no discussion at all of backups or disaster recovery.

It's because comments are usually far more intelligent and interesting to read and I set my app to open up comments than the story by default. I don't blame the others doing the same.

So how can you comment on, or have a critical thought about an article, if you're just reading a bunch of other comments likely left by others who also likely didn't read the article?

I find that genuinely baffling, and somewhat worrying, especially on more serious topics.

Mind quoting the section in the linked article that accounts for this, explains it, and justifies it?

Maybe just take a few days and learn how to do backup with a few simple commands?

Fortunately we have tools like borg that is stable and does your backup encrypted easily.

My mind only rests when I have my data encrypted locally before being sent and are put on different providers and regions.

Cost of not trying to learn because clicking seems easy is a cost by itself.

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