DISQUS

chuck · 2 years ago

andrew-

this is very cool news. i stumbled across S3 in my search for an online backup tool, but quickly learned that its not best suited for the casual home pc backup world.

glad to see that phanfare is able to leverage this service and provide more security to the paying customers.

chuck

Steven · 2 years ago

I am an ardent and enthusiastic Phanfare customer and advocate. I am glad S3 could work out well for Phanfare. On a separate, but related note, I am also a exec at a technology startup and am glad to see your implicit endorsement of S3 along with the statement in TechCrunch about how Amazon needs to have SLAs in place. I love the idea of outsourced infrastructure but am hesitant without an explicit guarantee of reliability.

I know a number other companies that have also been optimistic about Amazon's S3 reliability but share the concern of no SLA and won't use the service yet. I hope it works out great for Phanfare and your voice added to others encourages Amazon to have solid SLA's in place for their web services.

More importantly, glad to see Phanfare in the news. :-)

:-)

Andrew Erlichson · 2 years ago

Steven,
Indeed, with an SLA, Amazon would be very hard to beat. One confusion about S3 is that it was not built to be backup. It was built to be primary storage. Since S3 itself is backed up, it has a higher cost than simple backup. In fact, S3 is much more reliable than our old backup servers ever were. But since they were just backup servers, that was ok. Anyway, using S3 as backup is incredibly conservative on our part, but it does raise our costs a bit. If they gae us an SLA and telephone support, we might consider making it primary.

Andrew

Haebby · 2 years ago

Andrew - these are really GREAT news. Using a service like S3 to further secure our priceless memories (in form of photos and videos) through geographically dispersed backups is invaluable. This was one of the weakpoints of Phanfare - and now it's a very important and crucial strength! Please no compromises in data backup - keep using the strongest solution you can - even if it would mean to raise the service fee in order to cover increased costs. I'm extremely happy to see Phanfare strengthen the backup solution. Awesome!

aaron · 2 years ago

ONCE AGAIN - PHANFARE RULES!!!!


I'm working on my 5th free year now :) and i usually just tell people to give it o someone else, I must have signed up 10 users since i found the service.

Andrew Erlichson · 2 years ago

Aaron,
thanks for spreading the word and helping to build our customer base. We really do appreciate it.

Andrew

Zenigata · 2 years ago

That's a great news!

mike · 2 years ago

For those of you who lament that S3 isn't great for home use, you should check out Jungle Disk (http://www.jungledisk.com/). They make a little app that you can use on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems that backs up your data to Amazon. Amazon bills you for the storage. They're still in beta, but I've been using it for a while and it works great. I think they're only going to charge $20 for the app when it's out of beta.

Yes, you still deal with the fact that Amazon has no SLA, and you have to trust the Jungle Disk people. So far, I've been happy. (Disclaimer: I have no interest in Jungle Disk; just happy I'm using it and it's interesting to see someone like Phanfare use it now, tto)

Chris · 1 year ago

Here's what I want. Access to my photos on S3.

Not that I'd use it. But if I had to. If Phanfare goes down or goes away. So not access via Phanfare's S3 account, but in my own S3 account. So this is a little different from your implementation - you would have to add a feature to synchronize again all my data to my S3 account.

Then I can truly trust my priceless photos to this service for life. I could finally stop keeping local copies of photos. I would have enough confidence to give up local control and go with the combination of Phanfare (backuped with S3 *and* my data backup again in my S3 space.

I would pay for this feature (and the S3 fees).