I think I'll point to this as one of the examples of how AWS has been scrappy and successful. (Yes, I'll get like 10 flames on this comment.) They made this nice simple API for S3 that has become a de facto standard. They added lots of features and security controls, and I can easily imagine an architect saying "everyone should just adopt S3, it's so easy!" But huge, paying customers were used to tape libraries so they said, damnit, fine we'll pretend to be a tape library even though that is super weird on some level... Meeting users where they are can be a superpower.
AWS Tape Gateway
61–70 of 139 posts
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#62I think it's worth pointing out that this service was first released in 2012.
So why is it relevant to the curious mind on HN in 2023? Was there a significant change made to the system?
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#63Tangent: What's the cheapest way to backup a few TB of personal data these days, pricing based on the premise that I probably will never need to retrieve it (due to local backups as well), but I don't want to pay thousands if I do have to (hundreds would be okay). Glacier Deep Archive?
> What's the cheapest way to backup a few TB of personal data these days…
I'm using CrashPlan for Small Business, so I can backup select NAS shares as well. $10/month.
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#64I think I'll point to this as one of the examples of how AWS has been scrappy and successful. (Yes, I'll get like 10 flames on this comment.) They made this nice simple API for S3 that has become a de facto standard. They added lots of features and security controls, and I can easily imagine an architect saying "everyone should just adopt S3, it's so easy!" But huge, paying customers were used to tape libraries so th…
When someone is waving money in your face and saying "please just give me the thing I want and I will give you all this money", it's ridiculous not to listen. So many competitors just don't listen.
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backblaze B2 would cost you about $10/mo to store 2TB. I've been using them for years for a few tens of gigabytes worth of documents and photos. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html edit: it integrates with TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) so it's been pretty much set-and-forget, but I can check in and see my stuff through their management interface. I do encrypt my docs before uploading, which TrueNAS a…
Have you had any luck with picking and choosing what gets backed up? I have a bunch of smaller personal files I'd love to sync to B2 (photos, backups, etc.) but I also have 7TB+ of linux ISOs that don't really need to be backed up because I can easily download them again. I tried to exclude the folders I don't want to back up, but I haven't had any luck.
I use cyberduck and just manually upload.
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#66HEY! Before you adopt this check the bandwidth egress costs! Seriously.
Your disaster recovery plan will need to budget for extra egress costs if you ever need to restore something big from one of those virtual tapes. AWS charges for egress -- downbound -- bandwidth but they don't charge for ingress -- upbound -- bandwidth.
(And I think it's funny their icons and images look like old school DECTapes.)
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the latter. In a large enterprise, the backup configuration can be wildly complicated, a matrix of systems, schedules, slas, etc. Just reconfigure your backup software to use this new virtual tape device and you're on your way.
> Just reconfigure your backup software to use this new virtual tape device and you're on your way Isn't the whole point of tape that it is a physical thing, and may be taken offsite in a truck / stored in a vault, and all that jazz. "Just reconfiguring" your backup software sounds like a business might just bypass all that without necessarily realising the consequences. Then "we got hacked and our local backups are…
AWS's hard disks are a physical thing that is offsite
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#68I think I'll point to this as one of the examples of how AWS has been scrappy and successful. (Yes, I'll get like 10 flames on this comment.) They made this nice simple API for S3 that has become a de facto standard. They added lots of features and security controls, and I can easily imagine an architect saying "everyone should just adopt S3, it's so easy!" But huge, paying customers were used to tape libraries so th…
It’s not that weird. Tape libraries are well established and have well vetted highly reliable semantics that are deeply ingrained in many companies way of working. What’s weird is companies trying to sell some completely new way of achieving similar results and being surprised when the universe doesn’t reengineer everything as homage to their brilliance
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backblaze B2 would cost you about $10/mo to store 2TB. I've been using them for years for a few tens of gigabytes worth of documents and photos. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html edit: it integrates with TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) so it's been pretty much set-and-forget, but I can check in and see my stuff through their management interface. I do encrypt my docs before uploading, which TrueNAS a…
Have you had any luck with picking and choosing what gets backed up? I have a bunch of smaller personal files I'd love to sync to B2 (photos, backups, etc.) but I also have 7TB+ of linux ISOs that don't really need to be backed up because I can easily download them again. I tried to exclude the folders I don't want to back up, but I haven't had any luck.
rclone should do this, its been a while since it set it up, but its a cli to manage cloud storage providers, Backblaze is supported.
Re: AWS Tape Gateway
#70As always the problem seems to be the 'Hotel California' issue: you can check out but you can never leave. Once you have massive data in AWS there is no efficient and affordable solution to move that data back out; you are locked in forever subject to whatever future terms Amazon may chose to impose.
“Transfer up to 100 PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot-long ruggedized shipping container pulled by a semi-trailer truck.” - I’m guessing usually used to migrate corporate information into AWS, but can also be used for data export. They advertise Exabytes (using more than one rig I guess). https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/
> Snowmobile does not support data export.