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Amazon Glacier
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Amazon Glacier

KuroKuro Member
edited August 2012 in General

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

Looks like it could be a much cheaper alternative for those of us who store backups on S3.

Thanked by 3marrco Damian agapitox
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Comments

  • But keep in mind: It takes between 3,5 and 4,5 hours to access the data in case of an emergency...

    Thanked by 3klikli Asim Randy
  • flyfly Member

    it's not meant for emergency backups really.

    backup your stuff to s3 for emergency backups, then sync it to glacier over time.

    Thanked by 1Asim
  • AsimAsim Member

    At this point you may be thinking that this sounds just like Amazon S3, but Amazon Glacier differs from S3 in two crucial ways.

    First, S3 is optimized for rapid retrieval (generally tens to hundreds of milliseconds per request). Glacier is not (we didn't call it Glacier for nothing). With Glacier, your retrieval requests are queued up and honored at a somewhat leisurely pace. Your archive will be available for downloading in 3 to 5 hours.

    Each retrieval request that you make to Glacier is a called a job. You can poll Glacier to see if your data is available, or you can ask it to send a notification to the Amazon SNS topic of your choice when the data is available. You can then access the data via HTTP GET requests, including byte range requests. The data will remain available to you for 24 hours.

    Retrieval requests are priced differently, too. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage, pro-rated daily, for free each month. Beyond that, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per Gigabyte (see the pricing page for details). So for data that you’ll need to retrieve in greater volume more frequently, S3 may be a more cost-effective service.

    Secondly, S3 allows you to assign the name of your choice to each object. In order to keep costs as low as possible, Glacier will assign a unique id to each of your archives at upload time.

    http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/amazon-glacier-offsite-archival-storage-for-one-penny-per-gb-per-month.html

    Thanked by 1djvdorp
  • AsimAsim Member

    All I can think of is store all my mp3, photos etc for emergency-only retrieval (incase all my laptops melt and the home-based backup is blown too)

  • Awesome, completely awesome.

    This will cut our backup costs to S3 by several hundred dollars per month.

    Archive availability in 3 to 5 hours is completely reasonable, as the entire point of backing up customer data is to restore their VPS in the event of a catastrophic server failure. If we have a catastrophic server failure, we're probably going to have more than 3 to 5 hours of work to do before the server is ready for customer data again.

  • Unfortunately, looks like the only high-level APIs available at this time are Java and .NET. But REST is available if you want to roll your own.

  • MrDOSMrDOS Member
    edited August 2012

    Just swung by here to post this and saw it was here already. It's a prime time for Amazon to release something like this; despite the huge number of people using S3 for backups, that's not really what it's for, and the rates for Glacier are more than reasonable. $10/mo per TB of storage is ridiculously good – at current hard drive prices, it would take a year and a half to pay for my own redundant storage of that capacity (2×1TB at $90/drive), and that's not considering the power consumption of whatever those drives are attached to. It's even slightly cheaper per TB than the Backblaze Pod.

    Thanked by 1djvdorp
  • klikliklikli Member
    edited August 2012

    (What's the point of my reply? Please pass)

  • flyfly Member

    glacier bones you when you try to restore your data. check the restore fees.

  • @fly said: glacier bones you when you try to restore your data. check the restore fees.

    I think Wired wrote up an article on the "restore" fees and worked out it wouldn't be that much overall.
    The real boning happens when you delete data less than 3 months old: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_deleting_data_that_is_less_than_3_months_old

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    Cool, they charge if you delete your data :o Interesting.
    This whole thing looks like a marketing stunt to put upfront a very small price when in reality it is not that simple.
    M

  • Backup is meant to be write only and not deleted anyway. This pricing makes sure it's cheap only for actual backing up. And in the rare case of emergency a handful of dollars won't kill you.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    Not really. If I take backups I do them quite often and I would like to delete the ones 3 days back. I think it is meant more as a data bunker to save your files just in case, not a real back-up scenario.
    M

  • considering it's for automated use anyway i see no need to delete stuff so early. but yeah, apparently we agree on the use-case.

  • The 0.03-per-gigabyte-deletion is okay, except I found this today:

    The largest archive that can be uploaded in a single Upload request is 4 gigabytes.

    Which means some of our client data, usually archived per-VPS-container, will need to be split until multiple files.

    I see it, but not sure what i'm supposed to be seeing here...

    Thanked by 1klikli
  • @Maounique said: Not really. If I take backups I do them quite often and I would like to delete the ones 3 days back. I think it is meant more as a data bunker to save your files just in case, not a real back-up scenario.

    Hey M I don't know what we'd use this for either. We just have rolling backups of up to 7 days - not 3 months or 2 years.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    For example, I was thinking I only have 1 Backup of all my personal movies and pictures and that is some 50 GB. If I upload there will free 50 GB of backup and will cost me 50 cents in the long run.
    It may be an idea. Otherwise, for a person is not much use.
    M

  • @Maounique said: For example, I was thinking I only have 1 Backup of all my personal movies and pictures and that is some 50 GB. If I upload there will free 50 GB of backup and will cost me 50 cents in the long run.

    it'd be free, not 50 cents. amazon automatically forgives invoices below $1 due to merchant fees

    Thanked by 2Maounique djvdorp
  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    @justinb said: it'd be free, not 50 cents. amazon automatically forgives invoices below $1 due to merchant fees

    cool :o So I can use 90 GB in fact for free... Well, now it is really interesting :)
    Thanks for the tip !
    M

    Thanked by 1klikli
  • justinbjustinb Member
    edited August 2012

    i actually have no idea if it's still like that, but my past invoices for $0.73 and $0.49 etc are all zeroed out and i was never billed, with valid cards on file and everything

    do tell if you find anything out tho

    image

  • How does someone access that? FTP? RSYNC? Samba? WebUI only?

    Thanked by 1djvdorp
  • flyfly Member

    they won't charge you 82 cents because that's almost less than the transaction fee usually

  • NanoG6NanoG6 Member
    edited August 2012

    @justinb said: it'd be free, not 50 cents. amazon automatically forgives invoices below $1 due to merchant fees

    @justinb said: i actually have no idea if it's still like that, but my past invoices for $0.73 and $0.49 etc are all zeroed out and i was never billed, with valid cards on file and everything

    May be still on AWS Free Usage Tier (1 year)?
    aws.amazon.com/free/

  • No, for real now, how the heck do i get data up there?

    Thanked by 1klikli
  • Good question @William

  • @William said: No, for real now, how the heck do i get data up there?

    At the moment, you use either the .NET or the Java SDK.

  • lbftlbft Member

    @Damian said: At the moment, you use either the .NET or the Java SDK.

    Or write your own using the REST API.

  • KuroKuro Member

    In regards to early (before 3 months) deletion, it appears that the cost of storing data for however long plus the cost of early deletion is equal to the cost of simply storing that data for 3 months.

    This makes sense since (from what I can tell) they're using tape storage for this, so the tapes aren't always in a drive, and the tapes only have so many writes before they need replacing. If everyone was deleting everything after 3-7 days (and they weren't charging for early deletion), it would wear out the durability of the tapes much quicker, and the cost of replacement tapes would quickly outweigh the price they charge for the service.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited August 2012

    Tapes, OMG...
    This does explain a few things, however I would NOT trust my data to ONE tape. I hope they do have "RAIT" of some sort :P
    M

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