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Amazon Glacier

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Re: Amazon Glacier

#101

Post by arethuza »

zach wrote: post #28

Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. What would be absolutely fascinating is a pay-before-you-go storage service — data cryonics. Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years seems like a pretty intriguing deal as we emerge from an era of bit rot.

"Paying $12 to store a gigabyte of data for 100 years"

I'm not sure what kind of organisation I'd actually trust to store data for that length of time - a commercial organisation is probably going to be more effective at providing service but what commercial organisation would you trust to provide consistent service for 100 years? A Swiss bank perhaps? Governments of stable countries are obviously capable of this (clearly they store data for much longer times) but aren't set up to provide customer service.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#102

Post by jalada »

kondro wrote: post #93
jalada wrote: post #81

Can anyone make sense of the retrieval fees? Seems like the most confusing thing ever. If I'm storing 4TB and one day I want to restore all 4TB, how much is it going to cost me?

1 x retrieval request per archive (it's really designed to store a small number of large files/tars) plus $0.12/GB... therefore, 4TB = $480.

No, that's not right. That's only the data transfer rate.

If you check the FAQ, they bill you based on your peak hourly retrieval rate.

If I download 4TB at say...10MB/s, not only do I need to pay $480, but I also have to pay ~$257 as a retrieval fee?

Their wording is confusing, but ignoring the free retrieval amount (negligible difference on a 4TB transfer):

Fee = Peak hourly retrieval * number of hours in month * $0.01

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_ret...

Admittedly ~$737 isn't the end of the world if your house has burned down and you need all your data back, but it's still important to know the details.

I think in that situation, it would be cheaper to use their bulk import/export, which would be roughly $300 for 4TB

Re: Amazon Glacier

#103

Post by Baughnie »

Gussy wrote: post #53

From the retrieval times they are giving, it seems plausible that they could be only booting the servers 5 or 6 times a day, to run the upload and retrieval jobs stored in a buffer system of sorts. Having the servers turned off for the majority of the time would same an immense amount of power, although I wonder about the wear on drives spinning up and down compared to being always on. Any other theories on how this…

Tape drives. Lots and lots of tape drives.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#105

Post by gvalkov »

Here's to hoping that duplicity and git-annex could somehow make use of this service. I'm far more optimistic about duplicity support though, as incremental archives seem to fit the glacier storage model much better. A git-annex special remote [1] might turn out to be much more challenging, if at all possible.

[1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/

Re: Amazon Glacier

#106

Post by [deleted] »

jalada wrote: post #81

Can anyone make sense of the retrieval fees? Seems like the most confusing thing ever. If I'm storing 4TB and one day I want to restore all 4TB, how much is it going to cost me?

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Glacier

#107

Post by culturestate »

kondro wrote: post #90
ghshephard wrote: post #36

I'm a long time user of backblaze, and I'm a big fan of the product - it does a great job of always making sure my working documents are backed up, particularly when I'm traveling overseas, and my laptop is more vulnerable to theft or damage. With that said - Backblaze is optimized for working documents - and the default "exclusion" list makes it clear they don't want to be backing up your "wab~,vmc,vhd,vo1,vo2,vsv,v…

Home-use is probably the only situation Glacier is good for backup though. A home user is fine with a 3.5-4 hour window before their backup becomes available for download (as it will probably take them days to download it anyway). In a corporate environment, I don't want to wait around for 3.5-4 hours before my data even becomes available for restore in a disaster recovery situation. Seems good for archive-only in a…

In a corporate environment, I wouldn't want to depend on the cloud as my primary backup solution in the first place. I'd be much more comfortable using it as the offsite mirror of an onsite backup. If you're at a point in disaster recovery where you have to restore from your offsite, you (likely) have bigger problems than a 4-hour wait time.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#108

Post by tommoor »

biot wrote: post #89
ch0wn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think they could use this service? I can't think of a use case for them.

They store the last 30 days worth of versions of every file you modify. Dropbox could keep versions from the last 10 days in S3 but move the rest to Glacier. Restores for older versions wouldn't be instant, but if S3 storage is a nontrivial expense for them moving the bulk of previous versions to Glacier would cut down on costs.

I would guess it's a non-trivial expense ;-)

Re: Amazon Glacier

#109

Post by cstuder »

kalininalex wrote: post #96
ghshephard wrote: post #36

I'm a long time user of backblaze, and I'm a big fan of the product - it does a great job of always making sure my working documents are backed up, particularly when I'm traveling overseas, and my laptop is more vulnerable to theft or damage. With that said - Backblaze is optimized for working documents - and the default "exclusion" list makes it clear they don't want to be backing up your "wab~,vmc,vhd,vo1,vo2,vsv,v…

With large volumes the real issue is not the storage but the upload speed. I've done some experiments and with the Comcast link (20Mbps down/whatever up), I got 1 Gb/hour upload rate. So, it'll take 11 full days to upload 256 Gb. Or, more realistically, if you do it overnight (8 hours) - the entire month.

If you don't mind the additional cost, you can physically send Amazon a harddrive: http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

Re: Amazon Glacier

#110

Post by tommoor »

vidarh wrote: post #67
OoTheNigerian wrote: post #38

What I find fascinating with Amazon's infrastructure push is the the successful 'homonymization' of their brand name Amazon. Amazon simultaneously stands for ecommerce and web infrastructure depending on the context. e.g "Hey I want to host my server".. "Why don't you try Amazon". "Do you know where I can get a fair priced laptop?" "Check Amazon". Is there any other brand that has done this successfully? Edit: I shou…

Virgin (200+ businesses operating or having operated, under the Virgin brand, ranging from infrastructures - trains, airlines - to records, banking, bridal saloons under the name Virgin Bride...). Mitsubishi and Samsung springs to mind as two of the best known ones internationally where their brands are known in multiple markets internationally, though many of their businesses are less known outside Asia (e.g. Mitsub…

Like you say, many of the big Asian companies are prime examples - Yamaha manufactures Motorcycles and Synthesizers, seems like a good combination!
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