It wasn't built to back up your family photos and music collection.
But at its price points, with most US families living under pretty nasty data cap or overage regimes, it sounds superb, with of course the appropriate front ends.
There's no good (reliable), easy and cheap way to store digital movies, e.g. DVD recordable media is small by today's standards and it's much worse than CD-Rs for data retention (haven't been following Blu-ray recordable media, I must confess, I bought an LTO drive instead, but I'm of course unusual). And the last time I checked very few people made a point of buying the most reliable media of any of these formats.
In case of disk failure, fire, tornado (http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ ... and rsync.net helped save the day), for this use case you don't care about quick recovery so much as knowing your data is safe (hopefully AWS has been careful enough about common mode failures) and knowing you can eventually get it all back. Plus a clever front end will allow for some prioritizing.
Important rule learned from Clayton Christensen's study of disruptive innovations (where the hardest data comes from the history of disk drives...) is that you, or rather AWS here, can't predict how your stuff will be used. So if they're pricing it according to their costs as you imply they're doing the right thing. Me, I've got a few thousand Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs who's data is probably going to find a second home on Glacier.
ADDED: Normal CDs can rot, getting them replaced after a disaster is a colossal pain even if your insurance company is the best in the US (USAA ... and I'm speaking from experience, with a 400+ line item claim that could have been 10 times as bad since most of my media losses were to limited water problems), so this is also a good solution to backing up them. Will have to think about DVDs....
Very possibly, but who knows; per the above on disruptive innovations, Amazon almost certainly doesn't.
I personally don't have a feel for enterprise archival requirements (vs. backups), but I do know there are a whole lot of grandparents out there with indifferently stored digital media of their grand-kids (I know two in particular :-); the right middlemen plus a perception of enough permanent losses of the irreplaceable "precious moments" and AWS might see some serious business from this in the long term.
But at its price points, with most US families living under pretty nasty data cap or overage regimes, it sounds superb, with of course the appropriate front ends.
There's no good (reliable), easy and cheap way to store digital movies, e.g. DVD recordable media is small by today's standards and it's much worse than CD-Rs for data retention (haven't been following Blu-ray recordable media, I must confess, I bought an LTO drive instead, but I'm of course unusual). And the last time I checked very few people made a point of buying the most reliable media of any of these formats.
In case of disk failure, fire, tornado (http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ ... and rsync.net helped save the day), for this use case you don't care about quick recovery so much as knowing your data is safe (hopefully AWS has been careful enough about common mode failures) and knowing you can eventually get it all back. Plus a clever front end will allow for some prioritizing.
Important rule learned from Clayton Christensen's study of disruptive innovations (where the hardest data comes from the history of disk drives...) is that you, or rather AWS here, can't predict how your stuff will be used. So if they're pricing it according to their costs as you imply they're doing the right thing. Me, I've got a few thousand Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs who's data is probably going to find a second home on Glacier.
ADDED: Normal CDs can rot, getting them replaced after a disaster is a colossal pain even if your insurance company is the best in the US (USAA ... and I'm speaking from experience, with a 400+ line item claim that could have been 10 times as bad since most of my media losses were to limited water problems), so this is also a good solution to backing up them. Will have to think about DVDs....