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Amazon Glacier

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Re: Amazon Glacier

#111

Post by sspiff »

arethuza wrote: post #101
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 (cl…

Exactly. I doubt Amazon will be around for another century, but even if they do survive, their services won't be the same for that long...

Re: Amazon Glacier

#112

Post by kondro »

jalada wrote: post #102
kondro wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 * $…

You're right it is complicated. But it also depends on how much you have archived because you get to access 5% of your data on a prorated basis too and that's based on your peak hourly rate.

But ultimately, this product isn't designed for backup purposes. It's designed for archive purposes. If you have 4TB of customer data from 3+ years ago that you never access, but need to keep in case the IRS does an audit, then this is the place to put it.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#113

Post by reledi »

DeepDuh wrote: post #69
buro9 wrote: post #41

This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time. Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade. I don't mind not being able to access it for a few ho…

sigh Dropbox should not be used as a backup system. A system that synchronizes live should never get that role, except if they can guarantee that old data is never overwritten, new is always appended. This is not the case with dropbox - I've experienced multiple scary occurrences of old versions going to the nirvana with certain user actions. In certain cases the old data just appears to be gone, in other cases the w…

Though you make a good point, your comment could have avoided sounding pretentious if you shortened it by removing the first few words.

Also, please don't use uppercase for emphasis, as mentioned in the guidelines [1]. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

[1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Amazon Glacier

#114

Post by kondro »

webreac wrote: post #99
kondro wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here, we are producing logs of simulation runs that may be needed in the next couple of years. Most of the logs will be destroyed unused. This is a perfect use case for glacier. We do not care about 5 hours recovery time.

Absolutely, it's an archive product, not a backup product.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#115

Post by DeepDuh »

buro9 wrote: post #88
DeepDuh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sigh Dropbox should not be used as a backup system. A system that synchronizes live should never get that role, except if they can guarantee that old data is never overwritten, new is always appended. This is not the case with dropbox - I've experienced multiple scary occurrences of old versions going to the nirvana with certain user actions. In certain cases the old data just appears to be gone, in other cases the w…

No sigh was necessary, I understand. I even mentioned that I have a NAS and off-site backup... so either you didn't read it all or you stopped the moment you encountered the word "Dropbox" and started typing. That said, people DO use DropBox as backup. If you take a walk around the British Library and asked every PhD student working there how they "Backup" their research and work in progress, I bet every single perso…

"I even mentioned that I have a NAS and off-site backup... so either you didn't read it all or you stopped the moment you encountered the word "Dropbox" and started typing."

No offense, but this post doesn't quite match what you wrote originally. My sigh was in response to the phrase "Dropbox should work here, ...". You didn't state security as your concern as to why not use Dropbox, rather it was cost. This might lead someone who only needs "DropBox is used for backup because they've made file sync so damn easy that most people can be convinced that if a file exists in many places, it is backed-up."

And that's exactly what I'm scared about and why I'm saying it again and again that you shouldn't do it - if only one person listens and avoids potential data loss because of it I've already reached my goal.

"One of the things about backup is that it needs to be easy. Currently the size and cost of backups make it expensive, and the only way to reduce the cost makes it difficult (HDD local copies stored at a friends' house for example). By reducing the cost, perhaps we can finally increase the ease... and then a day may come in which most people have a real backup solution."

Agreed. IMO no consumer backup system is quite there yet. TimeMachine is very close, if only it would do better logging and have some more intelligence about warning messages.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#116

Post by ghshephard »

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…

Interesting to note - those of us who used Iron Mountain/Data Safe for years - 4 Hours was considered a "Premier Rapid Recovery" service that we paid a lot of money for (as recently as 2003, actually).

In a true disaster recovery (Building burned down or is otherwise unavailable) - it usually takes most businesses a week or so just to find new office facilities.

But - agreed, there will be some customers for whom Glacier wouldn't work well for all use cases.

Now - a blended S3/Glacier offering might be very attractive.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#117

Post by kondro »

I know a lot of people seem to have jumped on the backup options of Glacier here and, whilst there is some potential for home users to make use of this product for back, that is not what Glacier is intended for.

Glacier is an archive product. It's for data you don't really see yourself ever needing to access in the general course of business ever again.

If you're a company and you have lots of invoice/purchase transactional information that's 2+ years old that you never use for anything, but you still have to keep it for 5 - 10 years for compliance reasons, Glacier is the perfect product for you.

Even its pricing is designed to take into account that the average use case is to only access small portions of the total archive store at a reasonable price (5% prorated for free in the pricing page).

Re: Amazon Glacier

#118

Post by DeepDuh »

reledi wrote: post #113
DeepDuh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sigh Dropbox should not be used as a backup system. A system that synchronizes live should never get that role, except if they can guarantee that old data is never overwritten, new is always appended. This is not the case with dropbox - I've experienced multiple scary occurrences of old versions going to the nirvana with certain user actions. In certain cases the old data just appears to be gone, in other cases the w…

Though you make a good point, your comment could have avoided sounding pretentious if you shortened it by removing the first few words. Also, please don't use uppercase for emphasis, as mentioned in the guidelines [1]. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. [1]: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Alright, I've edited it, thanks for the heads up. Dropbox and backup in one phrase tends to awaken my temper as I've had some horrible almost data losses (as in I've had to restore data from the dropbox cache folder that could basically be purged at any point).

Re: Amazon Glacier

#119

Post by Dylan16807 »

DeepDuh wrote: post #69
buro9 wrote: post #41

This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time. Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade. I don't mind not being able to access it for a few ho…

sigh Dropbox should not be used as a backup system. A system that synchronizes live should never get that role, except if they can guarantee that old data is never overwritten, new is always appended. This is not the case with dropbox - I've experienced multiple scary occurrences of old versions going to the nirvana with certain user actions. In certain cases the old data just appears to be gone, in other cases the w…

The dropbox client itself keeps the old versions of files around for a few days. It doesn't matter if the backend gets confused.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#120

Post by kloc »

Amazon should complement this service with data contact centers which are connected to their data centers network. Then people could go to these centers in person and hand over their hard drives full of data for back up. It will be like bank lockers but only digital. At this low price people would want to upload terabytes of data which will be pain to upload/download.
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