Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Glacier

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 393 posts

Re: Amazon Glacier

#121

Post by zach »

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…

Yeah, I'm kind of wondering the same thing. It's certainly the kind of timeframe that changes your perspective. Maybe a tiny bit of Danny Hillis rubbed off on me from working at Applied Minds (man, I sure hope so!)

Because as we answer issues of cost and availability, a logical thing to wonder is "how long can I really depend on it though?" As quickly as cloud services (where "lifetimes" are measured at six years) have entered our economy, that's a question begging to be answered.

Amazon at least seems to be an "eventually durable" datastore, though. Meaning that if you are told in the future that it will go offline, you have an excellent chance to make other suitable arrangements. Say there's a 0.01% chance of this product being discontinued next year, up to a 10% chance 5 years from now. I have to think there will almost certainly be other services you can move your data to, on similar terms, for a long time.

That's assuming you're around at all, and nothing reeeeeally bad happens even so. Making data last after your death (or even after you stop paying!) is a lot harder in this environment, and achieving true 100-year durability is a tough nut indeed.

I like your bank idea, since the preservation of a bank account is just a specialized simple case of data preservation. Data preservation seems rather more reliable when the data is directly attached to money. Then again, maybe banks themselves are on their way out for this purpose — Dropbox could become the new safety-deposit box.

But there are 100-year domain registrations, after all. Maybe we're ready for organizations to at least offer 100-year storage, too.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#122

Post by ghshephard »

kondro wrote: post #117

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 transa…

For many users, though - they will never use the restore capability. And for those who do, with Backblaze, they'll usually get a FedEx of a Hard Drive - so Recovery time is measured in about a day or so. I wouldn't downplay the consumer backup/restore angle so quickly - for many (most?) consumers, the ability to restore rapidly is balanced by their desire to have low monthly payments. I think we're going to see a lot of consumer backup applications built on top of Glacier in the next several months that will be competing with (the already excellent) backblaze and friends. (Note - Backblaze has excellent real-time restore, with date versioning, for those of us who use it as an online data recovery tool as well)

Re: Amazon Glacier

#123

Post by gadders »

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…

I don't think DR is the correct use-case. I think it more likely to be (as in the case of banks which I know best) a regulator asking for electronic documents or emails relating to a transaction from 6 years ago (seven years is the retention requirement).

In that case, 3-4 hours would be more than acceptable.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#124

Post by cbg0 »

nicolas314 wrote: post #87
EwanToo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really odd, I've never heard of fees that high - in the UK I can use my credit cards with Amazon and only pay a few pennies in transaction fees. Have a look at the CaxtonFX Dollar Traveller, you need to load it with $200 but then there's no transaction fees I think, except a slightly worse exchange rate..

Sure there are workarounds. But why should I have to jump through hoops when my account at Amazon is already entrusted with a European credit card and merrily charging euros for all other goods?

This sounds like it's an issue related with your bank trying to scrounge more money off you. I have a European debit card and I get charged the equivalent in EUR, nothing more.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#125

Post by ghshephard »

zach wrote: post #121
arethuza wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Yeah, I'm kind of wondering the same thing. It's certainly the kind of timeframe that changes your perspective. Maybe a tiny bit of Danny Hillis rubbed off on me from working at Applied Minds (man, I sure hope so!) Because as we answer issues of cost and availability, a logical thing to wonder is "how long can I really depend on it though?" As quickly as cloud services (where "lifetimes" are measured at six years) ha…

And, since you mentioned Danny Hills, it's also worth mentioning that (ironically?) Jeff Bezos is one of the principle supporters of http://longnow.org/clock/.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#126

Post by DeepDuh »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #119
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…

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

Yes, I'm aware of that. This helps, up to the point where you don't notice that something's gone for 'a few days'. Let's say you have your student project's folder shared with two other colleagues. You take a few days off, use your PC for casual browsing, meanwhile your colleagues are working on the project. At the end, one of them (who doesn't quite understand how dropbox works) deletes the files while the other is still working on it and dropbox gets confused. Your PC gets synched at a moment where you don't notice. Come back from your holidays and you will have a nice surprise waiting.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#127

Post by arethuza »

zach wrote: post #121
arethuza wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Yeah, I'm kind of wondering the same thing. It's certainly the kind of timeframe that changes your perspective. Maybe a tiny bit of Danny Hillis rubbed off on me from working at Applied Minds (man, I sure hope so!) Because as we answer issues of cost and availability, a logical thing to wonder is "how long can I really depend on it though?" As quickly as cloud services (where "lifetimes" are measured at six years) ha…

Probably what would be required is an array of arrays of separate storage providers and services providing "RAID" on top of these storage providers - and you won't want to trust any of these you'll want a few of them... (hence the array of arrays).

Re: Amazon Glacier

#129

Post by moontear »

Crashplan is still cheaper for storage larger than 400GB.

Crashplan+ Unlimited is USD 2.92/month if you take the 4 year package. When I upload 300GB to Amazon and pay 0.01 * 300 = USD 3/month. Amazon would be even more expensive for larger amounts of data.

Is there some fine print I'm missing with Crashplan unlimited?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#130

Post by icebraining »

Swizec wrote: post #21
regularfry wrote: post #19

What does "99.999999999% durability" mean? Does it mean they allow themselves to lose one byte per terabyte on average?

I think it means there is a small chance enough hard drives might fail at the same time that there happen to be no backups of those drives. They make so many backups so quickly that there is only a 0.00000000001% (I didn't count the zeros) chance of this occuring.

More important than the speed of those backups is this:

Amazon Glacier synchronously stores your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on uploading archives.

Post reply on HN