Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by HaloZero | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

HaloZero

I think Backblaze offers unlimited for $6/month, Mozy offers 125GB for $10/month.

That same pricing $0.140 per GB (on S3) is $17.5/month unless I misunderstand S3 pricing.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

http://mozy.com/home/pricing/

https://secure.backblaze.com/buy.htm

Dropbox is more expensive but is syncing as opposed to backup.

View on HN

I don't think you misunderstand S3's pricing. They're not cheap. What they are is flexible, generally-high-availability, and you can choose the region you want to serve out of. For sheer storage costs, they're moderately high, same as their EC2 costs for sheer compute power.

... which is why it's inappropriate for a desktop backup solution. The chances of simultaneously losing your hard drive AND the entire RAID array in the Backblaze container that stores your data are so small that it's not worth paying extra.

If Backblaze loses your data and it's your only backup, you need to re-upload all your data. If that takes a long time and your hard drive fails during that time, you lose your data.

(disclosure: I wrote Arq)

I think with remote backups, a 2-part backup is probably the best strategy. Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner on an external hard drive, and remote backups with Arq, or BackBlaze, or Carbonite, or whatever.

It's possible to lose your S3 data too (and then you're in the same situation as BackBlaze losing your data). For example, I once accidentally removed all permissions from files in a bucket with Transmit, including the permissions to read files or set permissions.

I think Arq is great, just playing devil's advocate.

Looking at the s3 breakdown of what you get for $5/month, standard s3 ($5/0.014 ~= 36GB) or reduced redundancy ($5/0.094 ~= 53GB) not including rest requests and traffic, backblaze begins looking like quite a deal. $3.96/month for unlimited backup storage for one computer seems hard to beat.

Agreed, I wouldn't want to backup my entire laptop on s3. But since the first 5GB on Amazon's s3 are free, I find it's a great way to keep an extra backup of my current projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com