Maximum reliability

One of AstroBin's central ideas, since its inception, was to maximize the long term storage and availability of astrophotographs, so that tens of years in the future they'd still be available.

After seeing too many broken links on old forum posts, I thought it was time for a change. This is why AstroBin uses a secure and high-reliability backend for image storage, provided by the Amazon Web Services.

There are multiple ways in which AstroBin can store your data very safely. First of all, the images you upload are stored on a highly durable, highly available, redundant backend. The durability of the storage backend is 99.999999999% over a given year. This means that if you upload 10,000 images, you can expect to lose one image to data corruption once in 10,000,000 years.

The images are duplicated across two different physical servers in geographically distant regions, for protection against natural disasters. Additionally, images are protected by accidental deletion: the files are not actually deleted, but only marked as such, and they remain recoverable in case of human error.

The actual website, instead, is hosted on a Virtual Machine, so, in case of severe hardware failure, it can be redeployed to a different server in a matter of 15 minutes.

Finally, the database that powers AstroBin is backed up daily. In case of severe data loss, the website will be quickly restored to a snapshot that's never older than 24 hours.