
Amazon EC2 & S3 disaster planning (what does your disaster recovery plan look like?) - bootload
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/06/amzon_ec2_and_s.html
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weel
"as an example, recovering from a failed datacenter that was hosting a
petabyte of data over a 10 Gb/sec link will take more than a year"

Does it really? What if you load the data onto some physical medium and
physically move it from wherever it's backed up into the failed data center?
The latency of vans with disks or tapes may be high, but the throughput can
still way exceed that of networks.

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staunch
You're right of course. The famous quote for this is _"Never underestimate the
bandwidth of a station wagon full of tape"_

It's a laughable example anyway. Very few sites use anywhere _near_ a petabyte
of storage. I think he overshot a bit there. I also think he's generally right
about S3.

I can only think of two scenarios where I would recommend S3:

1\. You're spending such small amounts of money that buying your own storage
servers is out of the question.

2\. You don't have anyone qualified to run your storage servers.

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ralph
_Show you how many copies of a file exists, and how quickly a file uploaded to
them becomes redundant._

If I could search YC I'd point back to an earlier discussion we had on S3. One
of the points that came up was how do you know when your uploaded file is
"safe", i.e. not when the upload has finished but when all N copies exist so
you can go back to your user and say "fear not". A simple fetch of it is
insufficient; S3 is selling itself on its redundancy so it needs to prove it.
Anyone know of a way to do this?

~~~
bootload
It could be added very quickly adding a static textbox... eg:
<http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com+S3+uploaded+file+safe>
for example.

 _"... how do you know when your uploaded file is 'safe'? ..."_

don't know. might have to find this out.

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gyro_robo
Funny, I was just thinking about this the other day.

I don't think most of its users could _afford_ to move things in-house,
assuming Amazon would even announce in advance that S3 was shutting down.

