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Amazon Glacier

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Glacier

#41

Post by buro9 »

This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time.

Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade.

I don't mind not being able to access it for a few hours, I'm thinking disaster recovery of highly sentimental digital memories here.

If my flat burns down destroying my local copy, and my personal off-site backup (HDD at an old friends' house) is also destroyed... then nothing would be lost if Amazon have a copy.

In fact I very much doubt anyone I know that isn't a tech actually keeps all of their data backed-up even in that manner.

I find myself already wondering: My 12TB NAS, how much is used (4TB)... could I backup all of it remotely? It's crazy that this approaches being feasible. It's under 30GBP per month for Ireland storage for my all of the data on my NAS.

To be able to say, "All of my photos are safe for years and it's easy to append to the backup.". That would be something.

A service offering a simple consumer interface for this could really do well.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#42

Post by newhouseb »

It's a bit strange how S3 has a 'US Standard' region option, while Glacier has the usual set of regions (US East, US West, etc). I wonder if this means that unlike S3, Glacier isn't replicated across regions?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#43

Post by justinsb »

gjm11 wrote: post #27
Swizec wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which of course means that (if they're telling the truth) the probability of losing your data mostly comes from really big events: collapse of civilization, global thermonuclear war, Amazon being bought by some entity that just wants to melt its servers down for scrap, etc. (Whose probability is clearly a lot more than 10^-11 per year; the big bang was only on the order of 10^10 years ago.)

There's some clever wordplay/marketing here... "designed to provide 99.99..99%" means that the theoretical model of the system tells you that you lose 1 in X files per year when everything is working as modeled (e.g. "disks fail at expected rate as independent random variables"). If something not in the model goes wrong (e.g. power goes out, a bug in S3 code), data can be lost above and beyond this "designed" percentage. The actual probability of data loss is therefore much, much higher than this theoretical percentage.

A more comical way to look at it: The percentage is actually AWS saying "to keep costs low, we plan to lose this many files per year"; when we screw up and things don't go quite to plan, we lose a _lot_ more.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#44

Post by ojilles »

jordibunster wrote: post #22
benguild wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already supports it?

Kinda: "In the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option that will allow customers to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier based on data lifecycle policies."

URL? Can't find this on the website, blog or twitter account.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#45

Post by mvanveen »

I just started a project where I'm keeping a raspberry pi in my backpack and am archiving a constant stream of jpgs to the cloud. I've been looking at all the available cloud archival options over the last few days and have been horrified at the pricing models. This is a blessing!

Re: Amazon Glacier

#46

Post by pontifier »

terhechte wrote: post #6

This is fantastic. I've long searched for a solution like that. This is really suitable for a remote backup that only needs to be accessed if something really bad happens (i.e. a fire breaking out, etc). I'm a lone entrepreneur, so I do have backup hard disks here, but being able to additionally save this data in the cloud is great. I'm often creating pretty big media assets, so Dropbox doesn't necessarily offer enou…

I recently heard about a startup (spacemonkey) that will be offering 1TB with redundancy and no access delay for $10/month. The way they do it is really clever as well. Cloud storage has always seemed way too expensive to me, but these lower prices have me re-evaluating that.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#47

Post by nodata »

tezza wrote: post #34
phil wrote: post #24

Storage experts: I'd love to know more about what might be backing this service. What kind of system has Amazon most likely built that takes 3-4 hours to perform retrieval? What are some examples of similar systems, and where are they installed?

Typically they are tiered. There'll be a near-line HDD array. This is for the recent content and content they profile as being common-access. Then there'll be a robotic tape library. Any restore request will go in a queue annd when an arm-tapedrive becomes free they'll seek to the data and read it into the HDD array. Waiting for a slot with the robot arm - tape drive is what will take 4 hours. EMC(kinda), Fujitsu etc…

Wouldn't there also need to be a lot of logic to prevent fragmentation? You'd probably want data from one user near other data from that user, i.e. on the same tape.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#48

Post by kdsudac »

martey wrote: post #16

I think one of the most interesting parts of this is how they plan to ensure that people do not use it for transient backup: https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_de... 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…

Nice catch, that's an important piece of fine print.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#49

Post by natep »

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?).

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