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by smeagol 4998 days ago
hey guys,

i built this with a friend and didn't expect it to get posted to HN already. we just got it approved and i accidentally hit our Like button before we were even ready. my friends immediately commented on the story so we just said, what the hey :-)

in any case, it just "launched" today, was only meant for friends to test out, and yes i agree we need to write more copy.

to address some concerns:

- this is really only meant for developers at the moment; i.e. those who actually know their way around AWS. if and when we decide to take payments and provide a service, you can expect a lot more documentation and support. we have no desire to dupe normal folks. we built this for ourselves and really only expected friends to try it out first.

- you don't need to go to your AWS console to get your files. once a file archives, you can click a button to download it back to your Dropbox

- putting in warnings about the quota is a great idea! we'll do that ASAP.

keep the feedback coming, we really appreciate it and wanna build something useful for everyone.

2 comments

Perhaps you could offer a service where everyone saves their files under your corporate account. When 1 person needs to restore, it will mostly fit within the free download % of the total. So if 10 people store 1 TB each, you can download 500GB/month for free. It's like insurance. We all pay a small amount to cover when one person has a problem.
we hope to get to that very soon!

most likely, we'll just keep a small data center. something to get around the bandwidth limitation and availability. we would definitely need to charge then in order to cover those costs.

What's not very clear to me is if my Glacier files are a subset of my Dropbox files, or a separate datastore.

I only have 2GB of Dropbox space because I never upgraded. But I have about 100GB of archive data I'd probably throw into Amazon Glacier if it were convenient.

Do I need to open a 100GB Dropbox account before using IceBox?

What's not very clear to me is whether they have any idea what they're doing when it comes to security, or how to respond properly to a legitimate security hole. It's difficult to trust someone who builds a service like this and leaves securing personal keys as "something we'll get around to."