Thread: On-line storage
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Old 01-24-2008, 01:03 AM
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Semper Fidelis Semper Fidelis is offline.
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I haven't tried it but I would have no qualms at all using it. Really, what the product is, is a software module that allows you to buy space on the Amazon S3 system. Amazon deployed a massive file system with incredible reliability and redundancy and the interesting thing about it is that the storage is incredibly cheap and bandwidth is actually a bit more expensive than the storage itself.

It's not the typical kind of web accessible kind of storage (i.e. via http and ftp) so folks that use it have had to use the API to be able to use the S3 storage. This puts that redundancy and reliability at a cheap price at your fingertips.

Many companies have significantly reduced their prices by going to the S3 system. Perfect example is Smugmug that pays for terabytes of storage but has figured out a way to integrate the storage of images on S3 with the display of the images on web pages. Instead of paying for rack space, backup, etc at a massive data center they pay for what they use rather than having to pay for capacity to come. It's not super fast like having your own dedicated server but paying for exactly what you use is very nice.

If I didn't pay for a dedicated server and have some other options for keeping my data backed up online I would probably use this. I think this is but one of many products that you're going to see get developed as vendors figure out ways to make bandwidth and storage more readily available on a "use it as you need it" basis.
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