Be Excellent To Each Other

Iron Mountain should be a way cooler company than they are.

Read more here: https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/

Cloud storage lulz

Feex.

We have a something called a private cloud that lets people spin up servers for testing, with a supposed minimal fuss, still takes a week or more sometimes, not that I use it

It replaced an idea I did which I implemented called a VM test farm, except mine is still used more as I offer everything people need and want. The Private Cloud offers what the dicks in head office say which is Windows server, they now have one Linux choice and still no desktop OS

I get great pleasure that our CIO has told these dicks that mine won't get turned off until the so called global one offers what our customers want and the time taken to provide them reduces greatly.

With Cloud I love how 3 years ago you had online banking now you have banking in the Cloud.

There are some great benefits around keeping up with mobility and the shift to smart phones and tablets in the Cloud, they are also a lot of tossers talking shit about it to

I tried keeping my smart phone and tablet in the cloud but it was really inconvenient.

The project I run is hosted in Azure. (Microsoft's cloud)

I can spin up a server in minutes and increase the size of the cpu or the number of instances of it by changing a drop down.

Seems a very convenient way of using someone else's computer.

A week?! Cloud servers should spin up in minutes. Even a custom-build dedicated box should be ready well within a week.

I find its the Buster Sword storage that matters more than the Cloud storage

Ahem.

Look closely at the charges. You get charged a substantial amount if you retrieve more than 5% of your backup set in any given month. So if you suffer total data loss at home, you'll be paying a lot -- as in, potentially hundreds of dollars -- unless you can wait 20 months for your backup to restore.

But there's a world of difference between a DC where you rent rack space and own the tin and and a cloud provider where someone else is swapping failed drives and provisioning backplane bandwidth for you. And then if you talk about the latest generation of PaaS like like Docker, that's totally different again in terms of investment of the time and energy required to look after your fleet.

Server instances are not pets, they're cattle. You shouldn't name them and when they get sick you shoot them in the head and spin up a new one.

I agree, still prefer on demand rather than cloud

The latter isn't a private cloud. The terminology (for better or worse) refers to a 'cloud' that you host yourself - not a dedicated 'cloud' that someone else hosts for you.

The process of spinning up does indeed take minutes, its the process people have wrapped around it that takes time. Also there is not much management so they ran out of resources as they were letting people spin up servers with 128GB of Ram then not following up if they still needed it 3 months later

Yeah I missed your reply. I know this, given that I'm an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Sysops, and Developer

The point with Glacier is that you're not supposed to want to recover 100% of it instantly. If you do you're using it wrong. The most typical use case is when a business need to store, say, logs for a long time for compliance purposes but is highly unlikely to ever want to access them. In the event you do, you're pulling a small subset, way less than 5%.

Home use for me isn't a problem, and the retrieval fee for the size isn't actually that much if I care about 100% retrieval.

On this topic Amazon announced a new storage class for S3 yesterday - S3 IA (Infrequent Access), which is basically a Glacier-lite with faster retrieval and slightly higher request cost. It's basically the missing gap in the current lifecycle model and files can be set to automatically transition from one class to another after a particular period of time.

Oh, on on announcing this they dropped the existing Glacier prices by 37%, so my solution is now even cheaper than chips.

Detail here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-st ... reduction/

I photocopy everything and keep it in my garage.

I've also go some docs on Dropbox, but only about 1% of my free allowance, some photos on Flickr, and in Google Drive, which also has some photos that I want to share.

And I do periodic backups of my laptop to an external drive.

What I want to know is where, geographically, my Yahoo mail is actually stored. I bet the answer is 'all over the place/nobody really knows or cares.'

I remember, aeons ago, wanting all my mail downloaded on to whatever computer I was using, as I was worried that Yahoo would eventually go out of business and all my historical mail would be lost.

And I viewed with suspicion, the idea of storing my non-mail data on someone's server on't internet, on the assumption that one day they'd charge me an arm and a leg to keep it there, once they'd sucked me in.

You owe me £72.99 (£62.99 after cashback) for planting a terrible SEED OF DOUBT in my mind.

I have thought over the years that I should have an offsite backup because the house could theoretically burn down and every single copy of all our data is in this property, with the exception of a few things I have backed up to Google Drive. (Same goes for Mrs Hearthly, she has a few things on Drive, but for all practical purposes, everything is in the house.)

Some of it would be replaceable in time, but family pics and videos and suchlike would be lost forever. (Eleven years' worth of pics and vids of Hearthly Jnr growing up, for example.)

As such I bought a 2TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra drive from Currys for £72.99 with a £10 cashback offer* There are cheaper drives but this one has the benefit of (a) Being portable sized and taking all its power from USB and (b) hardware encryption.

My offsite backup location is a nice dry bedroom cupboard up at the in-laws house, so unless Ramsey gets nuked my offsite backup should be secure. And if Ramsey does get nuked we have bigger problems.

The hardware encryption isn't technically required as I'm sure my in-laws won't go snooping, but it does protect against theft I suppose, and also the very outside chance that my father-in-law be presented with a video of his own daughter having preggo sex. He's quite old fashioned, he wouldn't like that.

It's a fairly small amount of money to spend for pretty much total peace of mind when it comes to data security, and I've simply added the new WD drive to my usual backup rotation, which I generally run every two to three months. (I've just added a couple of extra jobs to Goodsync. Retrieving the drive, backing up to it, and taking it back won't be any hassle as we're up there at least once per week anyway.)

* As is usual for these cashback offers, you have to submit an online claim in a specific 36 minute window between 2am and 3am in the morning, at between 45 and 47 days from the purchase date, whilst stood on one leg with a penile erection not exceeding an angle of 50 degrees, and if your claim is accepted you'll get a tenner deposited into your bank account within a further 90 days. I'm slightly exaggerating, but not much. It's quite clear they only expect around 10% or so of people to go through with getting their cashback, but I will, as I can be very bloody-minded about such things.

Why not just use an online service?

Well in the apocalyptic scenarios for which I imagine my new offsite backup being used - (house burnt down, strange terrorists invade our house and steal all data, Mrs Hearthly goes mad and destroys everything with a wire on it, zombie apocalypse localised on town centre Ramsey etc) - recovering the whole lot from a single local drive sounds a lot more appealing than downloading over 1TB of data from an online service.

Also, the 2TB drive is a one-off cost of £72.99 (£62.99 after cashback), whereas online services cost money in perpetuity.

I need over 1TB of storage right out of the gates, increasing by several GB per month, with no upper limit.

For example Google seem to want $9.99 per month for 1TB (which isn't enough), their 10TB plan is $99.99 per month.

Also:

MS have changed all the OneDrive Storage plans now, its 5GB free with only a 50GB plan or Office 365.

There has been some back tracking over the last few months with them saying they were removing previous bonus storage which is 40GB of the total 90GB I have. They appear to have backed down in this for now as mine is ok.

Also another rumour that anyone using over 5GB of previous free storage will get 1 year fee of Office 365.

Regardless for a new user its 5GB free or a 50GB or Office 365 plan now, bit shit really as Office 365 is total overkill 5 X 1TB storage accounts that you will never use.

I remember seeing something around a small group of users who had used it to store multiple terabytes of data (and that's why it was being locked back down)

**edit**

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/03 ... d_no_more/

76TB the mind boggles!

Oddly enough the Enterprise 365 is still unlimited although it says 1TB on your user portal, you would think there was more chance of big companies abusing this than single users.

would big companies use this, rather than arranging their own storage?

We've got 1TB each, and for every employee that might get close to filling it, there's three or four that have a handful of MB in there, and I suspect that's similar in other companies.

Lost of Fortune 500 going into Office 365 and One Drive

We are deploying it to 10,000 users this year, sadly that's about he extent of the project, no plan on how we get the TB's of user data that in people My Documents

Got an email this morning saying my storage was all but used up on One Drive.

So I go to see what the options are, now on Office 365, a single rather than 5 person deal.

Found a voucher online and paid annually so its cost me £50.

For this I get 1TB, 60 minutes of Skype calls PM to any place you can think off, and one install of office.

Still a bit expensive when you can get the 5 person for £20 more.