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Amazon Glacier

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211–220 of 393 posts

Re: Amazon Glacier

#211
post #76

Interestingly they penalise you for short-term storage: Amazon Glacier is designed for use cases where data is retained for months, years, or decades. Deleting data from Amazon Glacier is free if the archive being deleted has been stored for three months or longer. If an archive is deleted within three months of being uploaded, you will be charged an early deletion fee. In the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, you…

After reading tezza's explanation [1] of how they're probably using tape storage, this makes sense; Amazon wants the mechanical robot arm to spend the majority of its time writing to the tapes. If you're constantly tying it up with writes/deletes, you're taking time away from its primary mission: to archive your data. Charging you for early deletes discourages that practice. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44…

They're not using tape storage. The ZDNet story confirms this: http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-launches-glacier-cloud-storage-h....

There are any number of reasons why deletes would be discouraged. One is packing: if your objects are "tarred" together in a compiled object, discouraging early deletes makes it more cost-effective to optimistically pack early.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#212
In case anyone is wondering it appears you can only upload from their APIs right now. I wonder if they intend to make it accessible through their web interface at any point?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#213
post #56

This sounds really appealing as a NAS backup solution, but I'm a bit concerned about security and privacy. Let's say I want to backup and upload my CDs and movies, would Amazon be monitoring what I upload and assume I'm doing something illegal?

In my experience Amazon doesn't care what you use AWS for as long as 1) your checks clear and 2) they don't receive any LEO interest in your data/service usage (i.e. WikiLeaks)

Re: Amazon Glacier

#214
post #197
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where does it show that? And are you sure we are talking about the encryption key, not the account password?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#215
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 le…

"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 A fair point. In my case, Dropbox use is in addition to local RAID (scratch) NAS (network scratch, access of larger files) + off-site (backup). I o…

"Vigorous agreement here too, except for the TimeMachine bit as that is Mac only and doesn't work for Well yes, obviously it only works in a mac-only household/office. I still think it's a good solution for non technically experienced users who only have macs since it's so simple that you could literally explain your grandma how to setup. I don't think mobile devices are that important on the other hand. The important data on them should usually be synched to your computer and as long as that is backuped, you should be fine. On windows I think that the built-in backup since Windows 7 is finally decent, albeit not yet grandma-proof ;).

Re: Amazon Glacier

#216

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…

I'm looking into supporting Glacier in Arq. It sure is cheap -- $10/month for a terabyte.

As a happy customer, I'm glad to hear this as well!

Re: Amazon Glacier

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US. UK. Sweden. It is really hard to come up with countries where the government has been stable "for a couple of centuries".

Thailand.

They have had a military coup within the last decade, not exactly a bastion of stability.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#218
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…

The Royal Mint has existed for 1,100 years. That's pretty much the most stable government-owned business-like entity I can find.

The Stora Kopparberg mining company has existed since it was granted a charter from King Magnus IV in 1347.

A few banks tend to last for a long time [1]. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena has existed for about 540 years.

Beretta, the italian firearms company, has existed for 486 years (and has been family owned the entire time).

East and West Jersey were owned by a land proprietorship for around 340 years starting from King Charles II bestowing the land to his brother James in 1664. [2]

At first I thought multinational corporations would be more stable because they could move from land to land to avoid wars and such. But apparently they haven't lasted nearly as long as their single-nation counterparts.

The Knights Templar were granted a multi-national tax exemption by Pope Innocent II in 1139, and lasted almost 200 years until most of their leadership was killed off in 1307.

The Dutch East India Trading Company was one of the first [modern] multinational corporations, spanning almost 200 years from 1602-1798.

However, the longest-lasting companies have been family owned and operated. [3] [4]

It appears most all companies that have lasted a long time are due to two factors: dealing in basic goods and services that all humans need, and looking ahead to the future to change with the times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks [2] https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nYQU4NpfD74J:... [3] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-05-14/centuries-old... [4] http://www.bizaims.com/content/the-100-oldest-companies-worl...

Re: Amazon Glacier

#219
I'm currently using an app called Arq that backs everything up to S3. If I had to guess, I'd say there's about 50-60 gigs or more on there. Last months bill was something like .60 cents. How does glacier compare or contrast to this setup (the app does something similar with the archive concept)?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#220
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally believe that data should never be deleted (or overwritten), but only appended to. Kinda like what redis/datomic does. So, keep live data onsite, along with an onsite (small) backup, and all the old data in Glacier.

You can believe that, but legal realities dictate otherwise. There are certain classes of information that you are not permitted to keep beyond a defined horizon, either temporal or event-based. Legal compliance with records management processes means having the ability to delete or destroy information such that it cannot be recovered. Note that if the information is encrypted, you can just delete the decryption key…

> Note that if the information is encrypted, you can just delete the decryption key and it is effectively deleted.

Does this satisfy the legal requirements you mention? I assume there are further requirements on what constitutes sufficient encryption?

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