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Amazon Glacier

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Glacier

#191

Post by guan »

zhoutong wrote: post #37
WalterBright wrote: post #35

I'm curious about data security. It says it is encrypted with AES. But is it encrypted locally and the encrypted files are transferred? I.e. does Amazon ever see the encryption keys? Or is the only way to encrypt it yourself, and then transfer it?

AFAIK the keys are managed by Amazon, just like S3. It's more for compliance reasons rather than real security. Encryption still has to be done yourself to protect the data.

It does protect you against situations where Amazon loses disks or tapes, or disposes of them improperly, or they are stolen.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#193

Post by sp332 »

jaggederest wrote: post #78
natep wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As long as that data is decode-able and more importantly, find-able (out of all the GBs frozen for 100 years, why would you want to look at any particular one of them?).

To be fair, if improvements in hardware and software continue at the rate they have been, or some moderate percentage thereof, in 100 years it will be no problem to trawl a few exabytes of data for anything interesting.

There's a blog that's analyzing Geocities, that's about 1 terabyte of 1 KB files. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ The analysis tracks changes in template design, follows modifications to logos and gifs, and unearths collections of shrines to dead children etc.

But that's from when it was harder to make and upload data, so people only put meaningful (to them) stuff online. These days we'd have a hundred thousand copies of a few popular MP3's and everyone's crappy digital photos. The percentage of meaningful stuff would be a lot lower.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#194

Post by jonknee »

ANH wrote: post #190
kalininalex wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Makes me wonder what Amazon is doing to commoditize its complements, i.e. what it's doing to improve high speed internet access. There are a lot of people in my vicinity who have no option faster than a wireless 3Mbps connection capped at a few GB per day. And this is within easy distance of Amazon's East Coast data center.

Amazon should be big fans of Google Fiber. With a gigabit this stuff is a lot more impactful.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#195

Post by dasil003 »

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?

You'll have to ask your bank since they're the ones screwing you. I've been using my US Wells Fargo account in Europe, and my British Lloyds TSB account in Europe and the US, and I've never gotten screwed anywhere near that bad. Maybe 1-5% premium I had to pay in some cases.

But in any case, you should look into getting a USD account. I have a USD and EUR account from Lloyds TSB International and it is a good way to guarantee I never get screwed even a little bit when I'm traveling and doing a lot of small transactions.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#196

Post by freehunter »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #139
jalada wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 * $…

This is so confusing. So apparently if you spend the entire month retrieving the data at 1.6MB/s it only costs $40 plus transfer fees? And more importantly, how do you throttle your retrieval? Edit: So I'm working through a scenario in my head and trying to figure out how charging based on the peak hour isn't completely ridiculous. I have 8GB stored to try out the system. This costs a whopping dollar per year. One da…

If you're in a corporate environment, you'd likely have a network admin group that could throttle your connection to them. Or you'd be using a custom-designed front-end that would throttle it. Or if you're SOHO, you could set up QoS rules on your router to throttle it.

Realistically though, this service might not be for you if fast and cheap retrieval of your data is important. The importance here is cheap storage, not transfer. They could reasonably expect that you'd only retrieve this data once or twice, if ever, and cost won't be deterrent. Say, if your data center burns down and your company is moving to a new office.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#197

Post by chmars »

jwr wrote: post #80
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…

What's even more important, you will be able to encrypt your backups without having to disclose the encryption key in case you ever need to restore (client-side encryption and decryption). This is not the case with Backblaze, which is why I switched to CrashPlan — but I'm still looking for other solutions.

CrashPlan shows your encryption key in plain text. Doesn't that worry you?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#198

Post by Dylan16807 »

freehunter wrote: post #196
Dylan16807 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so confusing. So apparently if you spend the entire month retrieving the data at 1.6MB/s it only costs $40 plus transfer fees? And more importantly, how do you throttle your retrieval? Edit: So I'm working through a scenario in my head and trying to figure out how charging based on the peak hour isn't completely ridiculous. I have 8GB stored to try out the system. This costs a whopping dollar per year. One da…

If you're in a corporate environment, you'd likely have a network admin group that could throttle your connection to them. Or you'd be using a custom-designed front-end that would throttle it. Or if you're SOHO, you could set up QoS rules on your router to throttle it. Realistically though, this service might not be for you if fast and cheap retrieval of your data is important. The importance here is cheap storage, n…

Oh I totally understand that people are going to be willing to pay more after a disaster to get files back. But realistically, if there is a large enough volume of files to bother amazon then they're going to need day(s) to download. If they rate-limited by day then the price would only reach a couple years of storage. The hourly thing is only going to bite minor retrieval events, and it is going to bite them amazingly hard.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#199

Post by Dylan16807 »

DeepDuh wrote: post #151
Dylan16807 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The colleague that was actively using the files doesn't notice them disappear? Can you explain how dropbox has lost history for you in the past?

It doesn't matter whether he notices it or not, you can't count on social factors when it comes to backup systems. He might notice it but then he thinks, oh no problem, it's all in Dropbox anyway, I'll talk to Dylan16807 when he gets back. I've never had any complete data losses until now, but I've had this situation where the Dropbox cache was the only place to retrieve files twice and it showed me that it can't be…

I just want to understand better why you had to resort to the cache. The only time I've ever done that was when I accidentally deleted a bunch of data and didn't want to restore each file by hand or put in a support ticket.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#200

Post by [deleted] »

jonknee wrote: post #194
ANH wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder what Amazon is doing to commoditize its complements, i.e. what it's doing to improve high speed internet access. There are a lot of people in my vicinity who have no option faster than a wireless 3Mbps connection capped at a few GB per day. And this is within easy distance of Amazon's East Coast data center.

Amazon should be big fans of Google Fiber. With a gigabit this stuff is a lot more impactful.

[deleted]
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