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Comment by shurcooL | Hacker News Reader

  > different parts of the world.

Still takes just one asteroid.

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Seems like after an asteroid hitting the earth, "server fault tolerance" is the least of our worries.

Yeah, but with the number of 9s you see you realize that asteroids are NOT taken into account. For example, Amazon advertises 99.999999999% durability for a given year for S3 objects. This is just stupid. An extinction-level event (asteroid, global thermonuclear war, black hole) could easily wipe out ALL data on S3. We know that mass extinctions have occurred about once every 100 million years. That means that if we expect a 10^-8 chance of a mass extinction event in a given year, Amazon would need a 99% chance of surviving a mass extinction in order to meet average durability ratings for S3.

After a certain number of 9s you just have to smile, nod, and truncate the number.

They really advertise 99.999999999%? Isn't that 1 byte lost for every 100,000,000 Terabytes or something silly like that?

Yes:

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_durable_is_Amazon_S3

I suppose that if they ever lose an object then they can say "well we warned you that you might lose an object every hundred million years."

> That means that if we expect a 10^-8 chance of a mass extinction event in a given year, Amazon would need a 99% chance of surviving a mass extinction in order to meet average durability ratings for S3.

On the other hand, it's unlikely that many people would be around to ask for a reclamation. It's more likely that Amazon would go out of business before anything like this happened, anyway.

Yeah, I was kinda referring to danger we as a species still face by being on just one planet.

Off-topic:

At one of my last jobs someone put the following ticket in the bug tracker "Following the end of the world on 12/21/2012 the system Blah will stop working"

After the date it was closed with a "As the end of the world didn't happen this ticket is no longer needed"

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