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

261–270 of 393 posts

Re: Amazon Glacier

#261

Post by exhilaration »

sreitshamer wrote: post #160
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…

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

That's Mac-only, right? Can anyone suggest an equivalent Windows tool for backing up to Amazon?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#262

Post by antoko »

antoko wrote: post #245
tc wrote: post #222

Beware that retrieval fee! The retrieval fee for 3TB could be as high as $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ [1]. It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it's available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour? This…

I think you're making an incorrect assumption about which is the most plausible method for calculating the hourly retrieval rate. The most obvious way to me would be to assume it is based on the actual amount of data transferred in an hour less the free allowance they give you. Which is actually what they say: "we determine the hour during those days in which you retrieved the most amount of data for the month." This…

Given tc's edits above regarding additional charges for transferring out of AWS I'm starting to change my mind. I still can't believe amazon would ever end up charging north of $20k for a 3TB retrieval but it seems the intended use-case (as enforced by pricing) would be write-once read-never! Other use-cases are possible but as others have noted you would want to be very careful how you go about setting it up to avoid getting some ugly charges.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#263

Post by bradfa »

natep wrote: post #49
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 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?).

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?)

I'd store my pictures there. Finding old pictures of grandparents when they were little, or even older stuff, is amazing. Wouldn't it be cool if my descendants could still look at pictures of my family in 100 years?

Provided that downloading from this 100 year store is something I could do X times per year, and so long as I could append more data to it over time, it's an interesting business model.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#264

Post by res0nat0r »

Loic wrote: post #247
tc wrote: post #222

Beware that retrieval fee! The retrieval fee for 3TB could be as high as $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ [1]. It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it's available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour? This…

Good catch, in fact it totally fits with the description of the service as a store and forget for compliance and access only a small subset in the case of retrieval requests — for example when storing customer records. I also must say that the way you calculate the retrieval fee is really looking like black magic at first sight. I hope they will add a simple calculator to evaluate some scenario and provide the expect…

This has all of the AWS services but not Glacier quite yet: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

Re: Amazon Glacier

#265

Post by rsync »

tc wrote: post #222

Beware that retrieval fee! The retrieval fee for 3TB could be as high as $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ [1]. It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it's available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour? This…

This was interesting to wake up to this morning ...

Right now we sell 10TB blocks for $9500/year[1].

This works out to 7.9 cents/GB, per month, so 7.9x the glacier pricing. However, our pricing model is much simpler, as there is no charge at all for bandwidth/transfer/usage/"gets", so the 7.9 cents is it.

7.9x is a big multiplier. OTOH, users of these 10TB blocks get two free instances of physical data delivery (mailing disks, etc.) per year, as well as honest to god 24/7 hotline support. And there's no integration - it just works right out of the box on any unix-based system.

We had this same kind of morning a few years ago when S3 was first announced, and always kind of worried about the "gdrive" rumors that circulated on and off for 4 years there...

2013 will be interesting :)

[1] http://www.rsync.net/products/pricing.html

Re: Amazon Glacier

#266

Post by [deleted] »

tc wrote: post #222

Beware that retrieval fee! The retrieval fee for 3TB could be as high as $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ [1]. It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it's available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour? This…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Glacier

#267

Post by digeridoo »

ratzkewatzke wrote: post #248
tc wrote: post #222

Beware that retrieval fee! The retrieval fee for 3TB could be as high as $22,082 based on my reading of their FAQ [1]. It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Is it based on how fast you download the data once it's available, how much data you request divided by how long it takes them to retrieve it (3.5-4.5 hours), or the size of the archives you request for retrieval in a given hour? This…

First, the reason the "peak hourly retrieval rate" of "1 gigabyte per hour" is there in the article is to answer this question. At a relative allowance of 5.12 GB/day and 1 GB/hour transfer rate, that gives you a "peak hourly retrieval" of .79 GB (at 5.12/24, your first .21 is free), and so we multiply: .79 * 720 * .01 Giving me a little less than $6. Now, do you think Amazon is likely to think they can get away with…

At 1GB/hour retrieving a 3TB archive takes 6 weeks...

Re: Amazon Glacier

#268

Post by rsync »

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 want to wait around for 3.5-4 hours before my data even becomes available for restore in a disaster recovery situation"

ding!

Re: Amazon Glacier

#269

Post by jordibunster »

sreitshamer wrote: post #160
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…

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

I think the key here is not to just provide a toggle for using Glacier instead of S3, but to have the historical snapshots migrated to Glacier from S3 and deleted every 90+ days.

I will gladly pay more money for Arq again.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#270

Post by ratzkewatzke »

digeridoo wrote: post #267
ratzkewatzke wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the reason the "peak hourly retrieval rate" of "1 gigabyte per hour" is there in the article is to answer this question. At a relative allowance of 5.12 GB/day and 1 GB/hour transfer rate, that gives you a "peak hourly retrieval" of .79 GB (at 5.12/24, your first .21 is free), and so we multiply: .79 * 720 * .01 Giving me a little less than $6. Now, do you think Amazon is likely to think they can get away with…

At 1GB/hour retrieving a 3TB archive takes 6 weeks...

So multiply it by your download speed. Let me know when you get to $22k.
Post reply on HN