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Re. geographical redundancy, see comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422574 :

"Amazon keeps at least 3 copies of your data (which is what you need for high reliability) in at least 2 different geographical locations. "

I can't find the original source supporting that statement, but I also know it to be true based on direct contact with AWS team. (I'm using AWS since private alpha of EC2 in 2005)

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I can't find that anywhere either, and would be interested in seing it. In fact, all I can find is: A bucket can be located in the United States or in Europe. All objects within the bucket will be stored in the bucket’s location, but the objects can be accessed from anywhere. which seem to imply that your data is located in one location, not 2.

In addition, looking at the actual S3 contract, they're really only guaranteeing at 99.9% uptime, which allows for up to 8 hours of downtime a year, more than enough to completely re-build the outer server once a year, as long as they can keep the data intact (which they seem more than capable of with their setup, once again assuming their data center is not completely destroyed).

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