I wonder if homeowner's insurance would cover the retrieval fee if your computer/hard drives were protected assets on the policy.
Amazon Glacier
301–310 of 393 posts
Re: Amazon Glacier
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some pretty old commercial organisations out there. One list [1] has several that have existed for over 1000 years. Whether they would be capable of storing data (or would even be interested in doing so) is hard to say, but there have at least demonstrated that long-term organisational continuity is possible, and that presumably requires some organisational 'memory'. Having a long history obviously isn't a…
How about Catholic church? That has lasted a couple of Millennia!
But, it has not been as stable as you might think. During the 1300s, the popes resided in France.
As recently as 1870, during the Italian unification, the church was stripped of its power to govern Rome after an armed confrontation between armies at the gates of Rome ("XX Septembre"). During this period, the Pope (the ninth Pius) seriously considered fleeing Italy.
Re: Amazon Glacier
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not clear to me how they calculate the hourly retrieval rate. Probably based on the speed and the number of arms that the robot has that will grab the right tapes for you :-) I'm not joking.
Based on the ZDNet article linked elsewhere on the comments, this system does not use any tape at all. It is all commodity hardware and hard drives, pretty much in line with the design of the rest of the services from AWS.
But why there is retrieval delay then?
Re: Amazon Glacier
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the ZDNet article linked elsewhere on the comments, this system does not use any tape at all. It is all commodity hardware and hard drives, pretty much in line with the design of the rest of the services from AWS.
But why there is retrieval delay then?
An uneducated guess? Maybe there is some type of spare storage pool just for staging the glaciar restore requests, and they've done the math to figure out how much space they need on average over time for this. The 24 hour storage expiration probably helps with this and they've calculated how much space they need to have on-hand and for spikes for restore requests and the restore delay helps factor in these demand spikes so they can move storage pools around on the backend if they need additional online storage capacity within the next X hours. Plus there could be limited bandwidth to these back-end archival arrays restore pool hosts to save on cost etc which is also part of the pricing equation/delay time.
Re: Amazon Glacier
#305I'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 long as you promise to have the glacier update be a free one, I am buying an Arq license this evening the moment you tell me it will be so! :)
Re: Amazon Glacier
#306I'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)?
Would love to know where you're getting that $0.60 number (I assume you meant 60 cents and not 0.60 cents). Even with the first-year free tier, it costs $7.00/mo ($6.00/mo on RRS) to store 60 GB of data on S3.
Re: Amazon Glacier
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've spent several hours reading about this and talking with colleagues, reading the (really great) HN threads on the topic and doing a bunch of math - and I've come to the conclusion that rsync.net/backblaze/tarsnap/crashplan probably don't have too much to worry about for _most_ use cases. The wonky pricing on retrieval makes this inordinately complex to price out for the average consumer who will be doing restores…
Online backup for my photos and other data was my initial thought, but I'm afraid it would cost too much to do a restore- if I store 3 TB of photos/documents/etc for 2 years, then have a house fire (local backup destroyed), I want to be able to restore my data to my new computer as quickly as my Internet connection will let me, and I don't want to be stuck with a huge bill for retrieval on top of all the other expens…
re: "I want to be able to restore my data to my new computer as quickly as my Internet connection will let me"
Really? Why? If you have say 10 years of home pictures/movies, and you know they are 100% safe in Amazon Glacier, why do you need them all on your new computer as fast as possible? I don't understand why its such a rush.
If it's a rush, you pay the fee. If you can afford to wait a month or two or three to get all the data back for free, you trickle your pics/movies back to your new computer one day at a time.
It seems Amazon charges by the peak hour, so if you can throttle your retrieval so that it takes 3 or 4 days to get the data back, the fee would be a lot less.
A 5 GB per hour download would cost $36 for the month. You could download your entire 3TB files in less than a month for $36. So I don't think that's a crazy fee when your computer was destroyed by a fire...
To get your data back in a week requires 17GB per hour, which is $128. Not unreasonable either considering the urgency and the circumstances.
Re: Amazon Glacier
#308> Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive.
That's pretty impressive. I wonder how many bytes they lost to lose that .0000000001% of data.
Re: Amazon Glacier
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the ZDNet article linked elsewhere on the comments, this system does not use any tape at all. It is all commodity hardware and hard drives, pretty much in line with the design of the rest of the services from AWS.
But why there is retrieval delay then?
Having a multi-hour delay in retrieval lets them move it into their off-peak hours. Since their bandwidth costs are probably calculated off their peak usage, a service that operates entirely in the shadow of that peak has little to no incremental cost to them.
Re: Amazon Glacier
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've spent several hours reading about this and talking with colleagues, reading the (really great) HN threads on the topic and doing a bunch of math - and I've come to the conclusion that rsync.net/backblaze/tarsnap/crashplan probably don't have too much to worry about for _most_ use cases. The wonky pricing on retrieval makes this inordinately complex to price out for the average consumer who will be doing restores…
Online backup for my photos and other data was my initial thought, but I'm afraid it would cost too much to do a restore- if I store 3 TB of photos/documents/etc for 2 years, then have a house fire (local backup destroyed), I want to be able to restore my data to my new computer as quickly as my Internet connection will let me, and I don't want to be stuck with a huge bill for retrieval on top of all the other expens…
I do my online backups to BackBlaze. $3.69/month and It backs up both my Internal 256 GB SSD and my External (portable) 1TB HD that I keep all my Aperture "Referenced Masters" on.
A Full Document restore isn't done over the Internet, I have Backblaze fedex me a USB hard drive - though, unless something has gone really, really wrong (Building burned down?) - I have a within-a-week old or so SuperDuper Image of my Hard Drive.
My Use Case for Glacier is Dropping a 10-20 year archive every 5 years. 50 Gigabytes of data will cost me $120 to leave their for the next 20 years. I can make good use of that.