[gregrata]

The key words you probably need to look at are "multi-petabyte". Not saying they shouldn't be doing something but it all costs - and at multi-petabytes, it cooooosts

1 Petabyte (and they have multiple) S3 - $30,000 a month, $360,000 a year

S3 - reduced redundancy - $24,000 a month, $288,000 a year

S3 - infrequent access - $13,100 a month, $157,000 a year

Glacier - $7340 a month - $88,000 a year

[zxcvbn4038]

Add in transit and cdn and Tumblr’s AWS bill was seven figures a month. A bunch of us wanted to build something like Facebook’s haystack do away with S3 altogether, but the idea kept getting killed because of concerns over all the places the S3 URLs were hard coded and also breaking 3rd party links to content in the bucket (for years you could link to the bucket directly - still can for content more then a couple years old)

[PostOnce]

Well, the business was acquired for $500,000,000 and a single employee probably costs what backing up two petabytes of data for a year (on glacier) does.

They could also always use tapes, for something as critical as the data that is the blood of your business.

Imagine if facebook lost everyones' contact lists, how bad would that be for their business? Backups are cheap insurance.

[FussyZeus]

Backups are still a hard sell for management, though. No matter how many companies die a quick and painful death when they lose too much business critical data, the bossmen just can't wrap their heads around spending $100k for what they perceive as no benefit.

Same problems with buying things like antivirus software or even IT management utilities; when they're doing their job, there's no perceivable difference. It's only when shit goes sideways that the value is demonstrated.

Hell you could take this a step further for IT as a whole; if IT is doing their job well, they're invisible. Then they can the entire department, outsource to offsite support, and the business starts hemorrhaging employees and revenue because nobody can get anything done.

[antt]

They are expensive until the business goes bankrupt.

[ummonk]

88k per year per petabyte is a small price to pay to protect your entire business from being wiped out.

[OscarTheGrinch]

Devil's advocate: it depends on how many petabytes you have. This cloud of uncertainty over your uploads could be seen as the hidden cost of using a free platform.

[pmlnr]

There are Supermicro chassis' out there with 106x14TB drives in 4u, super deep racks.

1PB is nothing today.

[idlewords]

Building such a storage behemoth is not the challenging part. Filling it with data, backing it up, and keeping the RAID rebuild time under load on such monster drives below the average drive failure time is the challenging part.

[bufferoverflow]

Or they can just have their own backup solution for a lot cheaper. 8TB = $140 on Amazon.

1 petabyte = 125 drives = $17,500 (one-time cost).

It will probably cost more to connect all these drives to some sort of a server. Though 125 is within the realm of what a simple USB should be able to handle (127 devices per controller).

[whoami_whereami]

And how many days of downtime are you willing to tolerate while you are restoring that petabyte of data from your contraption? Let's say you have a 10Gbps internet connection (not cheap) all the way through to the Amazon data center, the data transfer will only take about 12 days per petabyte then.

Getting petabytes of storage isn't the problem, transferring the data back and forth is.

[lugg]

That's like a developer or two..

Wth?

[zwily]

MFA delete at least doesn’t cost any extra.

[quotemstr]

So, roughly the cost of one or two good engineers? Not having backups is penny wise and pound foolish.

[ConceptJunkie]

"Penny wise and pound foolish" is the universal motto of management everywhere.