We use Amazon’s S3 service to backup your data. A few users have expressed concern about this, asking the question “what happens if Amazon S3 goes down?” My initial response is that it most likely doesn’t matter. The idea behind data duplication isn’t that your backup will never fail, it’s that if you have two copies of data, both on servers with low probabilities of failure, then the probability that both go down at the same time is extremely low. So, we aren’t backing up your data to S3 because it will never fail. We are backing your data up to S3 because we think it is the most robust solution on the market and has the smallest chance of failure.
My second response is that we allow you to download your backups to your PC for extra protection. In effect, you end up with 3 copies of your data: the original service, our service, your PC.
But all that aside, I want to point out a few things about Amazon S3 and why we chose them as our storage provider instead of building our own infrastructure for that.
1. We get to use Amazon.com’s global computing infrastructure, that is the backbone of Amazon.com’s $15 billion retail business and transactional enterprise whose scalable, reliable, and secure distributed computing infrastructure has been honed for over 13 years.
2. Amazon run one of the world’s largest networks of web sites, serving millions of customers every month, and executing millions of transactions for our customers and sellers. Over time, they have developed significant expertise in building, operating, and maintaining the worldwide infrastructure required to power their business.
3. Amazon’s data center is reliable and redundant. The datacenter is built using large amounts of commodity hardware. When one node fails, millions of other nodes pick up the slack. As a result, we the infrastructure is self healing.
4. Amazon S3 is amazingly secure because Amazon uses multiple layers of operational and physical security to ensure the integrity and safety of your data.
In short, we felt that Amazon S3 was the most secure, the most reliable, and the most experienced provider of storage services. We feel very comfortable with them as a partner.
