Phanfare Blog - Latest Comments in Danger data loss give hosted services a bad name

Re: Danger data loss give hosted services a bad name

erlichson — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:58:09 -0000

I agree that business risk is a greater risk than technology when storing data at phanfare, but I don’t think the business risk is much of a risk because we would need to disappear overnight, which is not going to happen. Even if for some reason phanfare was to discontinue the service, that event would not happen overnight. There would be time to get back your data.

I will grant you, however, that retrieving your data from any online service all at once can be difficult. If your collection is over 10 GB, you would likely find it easier to have us send it on DVD, which we offer today.

Personally, I like our DVD subscription service. That way you have it and we have it, and you get it back in a form that benefits from the organizational effort you expended with your Phanfare account.

Re: Danger data loss give hosted services a bad name

rlieving — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:51:09 -0000

The most likely risk of losing data at Phanfare is business risk, not the risk of terrorist attack or technical failure. I like your analysis about what happened at Microsoft/Danger and agree that it might send the wrong signals about the trustworthiness of the cloud.

On the other hand, I think it is irresponsible to imply that a person should not make multiple backups of their data. In the age of large, blue chip, publicly traded companies going out of business, it isn't unreasonable to think that the same thing could happen to a small company like Phanfare or even a big company like Amazon.

I personally keep a copy of my pictures on my hard drive, back up to JungleDisk AND use Phanfare. As Brad pointed out below, I have a slight redundancy risk in that JungleDisk and Phanfare use Amazon as their persistence method. But I think the risk is minimal that S3 AND the vendors I deal with will all go out of business at the same time that I have a hard drive failure. And if that does happen, perhaps the zombies will be rising out of the ground and I will have bigger issues to deal with.

Here's the lesson I took away from all this: my analysis that the Sidekick is weak was correct. Get an iPhone, Nokia, Blackberry (or even) Windows Mobile and personally back up your data.

Re: Danger data loss give hosted services a bad name

Brad Murray — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:50:31 -0000

They don't give the details, but they have confirmed to me that they don't keep S3 objects on both coasts. The only way to do that is to store multiple copies in S3 yourself and make sure that the transfers are routed correctly to get the objects on the correct coast. They may have made the destination configurable in the request, but I haven't seen it.

Re: Danger data loss give hosted services a bad name

erlichson — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:02:20 -0000

I don’t know the details but my recollection, from the days where I worked in banking, is that most institutions try to keep data centers approximately 20 miles away from each other to satisfy the requirements of disaster recovery. Amazon considers the exact details of their implementation to be highly proprietary and does not disclose them to the public to my knowledge.

Re: Danger data loss give hosted services a bad name

Brad Murray — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:03:21 -0000

I wouldn't call S3 geographically distributed. They have east (DC - I believe) and west (Seattle) clusters of datacenters (and at least one in Europe if you're willing to pay more to store your stuff). If your request routes to the west cost it is stored only there (in multiple local datacenters). I was under the delusion that they kept at least 2 copies where it's uploaded and sent another one to the other side of the country, but that is not the case. Granted - a large-scale terrorist attack in the Seattle area would probably cripple Amazon anyway, but it would have a high likelihood of destroying a lot of data and I think a lot of their customers would be shocked.