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Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

Because cloud this and cloud that! I feel like I'm the only person firmly against cloud storage. I'd constantly feel paranoid about my data randomly disappearing at the hands of a company I don't know run by people I don't know on hardware I don't trust.

I want everything local.

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Local data can randomly disappear too - hard drives don't always fail in a predictable fashion.

Personally, I prefer to use both local and cloud storage (encrypted, bien sûr).

I periodically mail a DVD of important stuff to my parents and ask them to toss it in the basement. You could do the same thing with backup tapes, or whatever.

Drives/tape/flash/dvd is pretty damn cheap and easy. These S3 type solutions would have to be much cheaper to be interesting.

A DVD holds 4.7GB. Box.net offers 5GB for free.

Besides, how do you verify that those backups can be restored when you need them, if they're offline in some remote location? That seems rather untrustworthy to me. I run checks against parity files regularly to verify their integrity.

10 DVDS hold 47GB. How much does that cost on Box?

And can you download 47GB faster than your mom can mail you a DVD?

Storing 47GB would cost you 47 cents/month on Glacier.

And can you download 47GB faster than your mom can mail you a DVD?

Probably, though I'm not quite sure about the speed of S3. I use a cheap VPS instead (much more expensive than Glacier, but also much, much more useful), from which I can easily get 3MB/s, so that would definitively be yes.

A local backup isn't much of a backup. A single fire, flood, theft, storm, earthquake, etc. shouldn't be able to destroy every copy of your data. You must have at least one offsite copy of anything valuable.

http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview

What happens when there's an earthquake? Or theft? Or fire?

My own cloud? It's not really hard to get your own service up and running. All my shits auto backed up to my dedicated which has terabytes and terabytes of storage.

Where do you store it?

Family network. We all run servers in our houses that are connected and each keep backups of eachothers backups. Backups at my parents, grandparents, cousins in colorado, family in Poland. All encrypted, all silently running in the basement of each house. All updated every week.

Who manages that hardware? I wouldn't mind getting a NAS on my grandmother's, but I can't do cross-country trips if a disk fails.

Regardless, that seems a nice setup. I'm not opposed to the cloud (as long as I treat it as a dumb storage system), but it's certainly more expensive than buying your own disks.

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