Amazon Glacier for online storage

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undesign

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Has anyone used this service for online photo storage? It is fairly cheap, caveat being that it is not for regular access.

I have about 100Gb that I want to store - don't need access to the backups apart from a complete catastrophe event (running onsite HDD mirror + offsite portable HDD backup). Going to start with more important sets first and work through them at over time. (4meg upload speeds helps :))

Cost is $0.01 per gigabyte per month i.e. R10 p.m. for 100Gb.

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

http://www.labnol.org/internet/amazon-glacier-for-online-backup/25000/

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/134776-amazon-glacier-99-999999999-durability-long-term-storage-for-a-penny-a-gig

Seems like a really good, inexpensive "backup and forget" option.

Your thoughts?
 
Last edited:
Guantanamo said:
Flickr gives you a free terabyte and uploads photos at full resolution.
Click to expand...

I'm a bit hesitant to use a file sharing/social media website for genuine archival purposes, can't help but wonder about longevity, privacy and copyright issues etc.
 
I use Glacier for my photo library (530GB odd, currently) and some other important documents. I use Arq as the backup client:

The one important thing that you don't see often is the restore costs. It's not free - in fact, it can be very expensive. Amazon's page lists all the various factors that are charged for, and it's not the kind of thing that you can just reference and know how much it will be. Thankfully, someone made a calculator to do that:

Unofficial Amazon AWS Glacier Calculator

For me, if I want a 4 hour restore, it will probably cost around $1000. Now, that's a lot of money, but consider this in a cost/risk perspective. I have two backup drives, one at home, one at work. If something was to happen that took out both my home *and* my work place (20km away), and if I survived the event, and if I accept the standard 4 hours response time, it would cost me $1000 odd to restore. Of course, you can choose how long you're willing to wait - the longer it takes, the less you pay. In the aforementioned event, I might be happy with a 48 hour restore time, which would cost me $188.

But the point is, I have my things arranged so that a restore for Glacier is extremely unlikely to ever be necessary.

If you want to go for it, in the Mac world, Arq is almost certainly the best option: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

If you're on Windows, I hear CloudBerry is where it's at.
 
koffiejunkie said:
I use Glacier for my photo library (530GB odd, currently) and some other important documents. I use Arq as the backup client:

The one important thing that you don't see often is the restore costs. It's not free - in fact, it can be very expensive. Amazon's page lists all the various factors that are charged for, and it's not the kind of thing that you can just reference and know how much it will be. Thankfully, someone made a calculator to do that:

Unofficial Amazon AWS Glacier Calculator

For me, if I want a 4 hour restore, it will probably cost around $1000. Now, that's a lot of money, but consider this in a cost/risk perspective. I have two backup drives, one at home, one at work. If something was to happen that took out both my home *and* my work place (20km away), and if I survived the event, and if I accept the standard 4 hours response time, it would cost me $1000 odd to restore. Of course, you can choose how long you're willing to wait - the longer it takes, the less you pay. In the aforementioned event, I might be happy with a 48 hour restore time, which would cost me $188.

But the point is, I have my things arranged so that a restore for Glacier is extremely unlikely to ever be necessary.

If you want to go for it, in the Mac world, Arq is almost certainly the best option: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

If you're on Windows, I hear CloudBerry is where it's at.
Click to expand...

Thanks Koffie, was just reading up on GUI options. Completely agree with your retrieval assessment - not worried about costs as time is not an issue, I can spread retrieval over days/weeks/months if necessary. It is all about total catastrophe backup e.g. burglary/fire AND offsite HDD fails. In all likelihood I will never access it...but that's not the point. Peace of mind with a reputable, dependable, not necessarily flavour of the month solution is what I'm ultimately after.

I think I'm going to give this a try.
 
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