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Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

I put all my "decade from now" files on three separate 500GB USB drives, each storing the same data, and each drive from different manufacturers/dates. Two drives stored in a safe at my house, and one in a safe at my brother's house. I used to store in S3, and it was more convenient, but I just felt weird about storing really important files on someone else's cloud -- what if I don't login to the AWS account for 9 years, and then when I need my files, I find out AWS kindly deleted/disabled my account and I didn't know about it? That situation is my biggest concern.

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> what if I don't login to the AWS account for 9 years, and then when I need my files, I find out AWS kindly deleted/disabled my account and I didn't know about it? That situation is my biggest concern.

Understandable concern, but AWS being targeted at enterprise gives me confidence they don't do any funny stuff like that. On and of course, they bill you monthly, so ideally you'd have a tell if something goes wrong.

I also store my files locally on a USB drive in alternative locations, but I conceptually trust S3, but maybe actions speak louder.

Local vs cloud backups each have their own tradeoffs. I use both.

For cloud backup I use Arq backing up daily to AWS (no affiliation with Arq other than being a happy customer). You get client side encryption and the daily backup directly mitigates your concern, if there’s an AWS account issue you will know immediately and can fix it. For my storage amount and use it only costs about $2 a month.

if you accidentally create way too much data and it gets automatically hacked up, do you get a huge bill? Or is it capped somehow?

I don’t know. I’ve been using this setup for 7+ years, daily backups, and never had this problem.

I have about 80 GB or so of data being backed up. The daily backups upload only new files plus files that are changed. The largest monthly AWS bill I ever got was $6. The next month it went back to the usual ~$2 range.

What kind of files? I can't think of anything I have that I would go through this effort for.

Scans of your birth certificate, passport, house title, car title as starters.

I see. None of those things (in my experiences, no house title ever) have sufficed as a copy. So if you need it and your house burnt down, it's a wait until they're reissued.

Family photos/videos and genealogy documents of multiple generations of family makes up the bulk of data I hold dear.

While a scanned copy of something like a birth certificate or deed might not often work in place of a physical copy they're nice to have on hand. Plus they're a part of a family history.

you have to pay to store stuff on S3 (or glacier), monthly. So i don't think they care if you log in - if your credit card on file allows billing for 9 years.

i do the same thing!

i use spinning rust in x3 single usb external enclosures[1].

i mirror s3 data, both as an extra backup and to prevent s3 egress billing for random access.

s3 egress is for disaster recovery only.

1. https://github.com/nathants/mirror

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