

Ask HN: How redundant is S3? Do I need another backup? - marcamillion

How often does S3 lose/delete your files? Or is there some backup feature/functionality built in, that is pretty robust?<p>If it will be storing all the user uploaded files, should I also be pushing those files to some other CDN - like Rackspace's CloudFiles?
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dholowiski
I've heard it said that "if it doesn't exist in three places, it doesn't
exist". Despite any claims of reliability, I would always make sure my
critical data is backed up in two totally different locations.

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davej
With S3 your data is stored in more than three places though.

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dholowiski
But it's only stored in one service. If amazon goes bankrupt tomorrow, it's
gone.

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davej
Honestly, you don't need do; everything stored on S3 (unless you're storing it
on RRS) is crazy redundant. Amazon claim 99.999999999% durability in any given
year: <http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_durable_is_Amazon_S3>

A bigger worry IMO would be accidentally deleting the files yourself (perhaps
through a bug in client code). You can always enable versioning on your bucket
to protect against that though.

