Digital BW, The Print

At 2:25 PM -0700 8/12/07, Chris Wong wrote:

>Smugmug.com uses Amazon's S3 technology which has at least 3 
>redundant copies of your data distributed.

So?

If SmukMuck tanks, you tank.

That's the whole point:

If you let your non-replaceable data out of your hands you lose control.

It doesn't matter how many redundant copies of your data they have 
if, for any reason, you cannot connect to it.

>I think it's vital that we all read the user agreement

Which is couched in lawyer-speak, and is meaningless unless you can 
afford a better legal team than they, or their trustees, can field.

>we'd be at least notify ahead of time to transfer our asset over to
>another service.

I'd think not.

When something folds, it tries to fold before the creditors know 
about it. It certainly doesn't broadcast on the internet.

>I have a RAID system taking care of my local backup.

A good choice.

May I offer you two words common among those of us who live in "Tornado Alley"?

"Total detestation."

And then there's every RAID owner's greatest fear:

"Lightning-induced massive voltage spike."

And then there's:

"Fire!"

Or maybe, every Katrina victim's least favorite:

"Flooding."

>The drawback of CD/DVD is its speed.

So go take (short) nap.

>Totally not worth it in my opinion. I'd rather bill myself to have a
>faster but slightly more expensive solution.

A slightly faster but much less secure one.

>Unless the data you need to backup are not a lot, CD/DVD is just not
>very scalable.

You mean you don't have a date-inverse backup paradigm _and_ you 
aren't making incremental backups?

Now that, regardless of the backup destination, is a disaster that 
_will_ happen.


-=-Dennis






















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