[thrw42A8N]

You can't rely on VPS disk - backups, data retention and recovery is all up to you in case of node failure. There are other much more expensive and much slower products (external networked volumes) that do offer guarantees, but that's additional charge.

[justinclift]

> backups

Just to point out, if the data is important you'll want backups anyway. Even with S3.

Just in case. :D

[vbezhenar]

Why would you want backups for S3? Were there data loss incidents?

[indigo945]

Well, Amazon might fail as a company at some point and then all your data will be gone. Theoretically.

Much more likely, though, is that you, or some sysadmin at your company, or even some user will accidentally hit the "delete" button on something important, and then without a backup, you can't get it back. Which is honestly the thing that people usually need their backups for, anyway. This is what most "data loss incidents" are: people just messing up and deleting things they shouldn't have. Wetware is much more prone to failure than hardware, after all.

[vbezhenar]

There are ways to protect against delete or overwrite, for example by using versions.

[justinclift]

Does that work when the sysadmin fat fingers the deletion of a bucket or account?

[justinclift]

> Why would you want backups for S3?

In case something goes wrong. ie your account has a problem unexpectedly, or if they do indeed have a data loss/corruption problem, etc.

[jeltz]

Most VPS providers offer a backup solution.

[sigio]

Yes, and you never use those, because if the VPS company fails, your backups are gone. So use the backup services of a second (and third) company if you value your data.

[thrw42A8N]

As I said, that's an additional charge.