[waps]

Really ? And what if Amazon loses data ? [1] But all data saved to S3 was safe, right ? No. [2]

The key to decent safety is to 1) have an online backup at a different provider you can switch to quickly 2) have regular offline backups 3) actually reinstall from those offline backups on a regular basis

Amazon falls flat on it's face with (1). If you use Amazon's tools you cannot have that, period. I would argue that securing against amazon financial failure is one of the important objectives of (2), so you cannot use glacier for that.

This means that using just amazon (or even having your primary and online backup on amazon) is a bad idea. Given that you can't really use those amazon products anyway, you may as well save the money and go for hetzner and ovh or something like that. Famous customers like Netflix moved away from Amazon lock in [3] and for anything that you want to last, you should too.

We all know that most people's backup strategy tends to be "X" will never fail. X in the worst case is their hard drive. For larger businesses X usually is something like EMC, and we've all seen it fail (usually, to be fair, not EMC's fault). You are replacing X with "Amazon" and that's it.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 [2] http://www.quora.com/Has-Amazon-S3-ever-lost-data-permanentl... [3] http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/19/adrian-cockcroft-public-cl...