Amazon's new Archival service "Glacier"

Tom · August 21, 2012, 11:32:06 AM

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/for-one-cent-a-month-amazon-glacier-stores-your-data-for-centuries/

Basically they store multiple copies of your data per data center in multiple data centers. Guarantee is currently at /eleven/ nines. I'd bet its higher than that given the details. but 11 nines is a pretty absurd number to begin with.

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

I think I'll give it a whirl. It's dirt cheap for the amount of data I have to back up.

Mr. Analog · August 21, 2012, 11:46:34 AM

I saw someone work out the price difference and it's more expensive for frequent backup runs than tape.

I think unless the price comes down and trust levels go up with cloud infrastructure it's not going to go very far.

Tom · August 21, 2012, 11:47:33 AM

I think thats only the case if you actually access your backups a lot, and if they are /large/.

I think the idea with the service at the moment is that you store it, and then forget about it. This is archival storage. Only to be accessed in the case of an absolute emergency when the rest of your backups are inaccessible.

Mr. Analog · August 21, 2012, 11:53:57 AM

I agree, but then again most folks who are making tape backups are doing so because they have a massive amount of data to backup on a regular basis.

Tom · August 21, 2012, 11:56:31 AM

Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 21, 2012, 11:53:57 AM
I agree, but then again most folks who are making tape backups are doing so because they have a massive amount of data to backup on a regular basis.

Sure. I don't think this service is meant to replace people's massive tape backup systems. Maybe to provide a second home. But I think mainly its for people and businesses that don't have the money to invest in tape or more expensive archival storage. Sure you still need to keep other backups, but this seems like a great secondary backup location.

Mr. Analog · August 21, 2012, 12:10:29 PM

Oh yeah, I could get this as a sort of intro to offsite backups, I pity the industry that comes under legal review trying to pull down several TB en masse from the cloud though hah!

Thorin · August 21, 2012, 01:55:10 PM

Hmm, so free to back up to, costs money to retrieve files. Putting my roughly terabyte of data from my Drobo on there would cost $12 to download if the Drobo fails. That doesn't sound to bad.

Tom · August 21, 2012, 02:21:20 PM

Quote from: Thorin on August 21, 2012, 01:55:10 PM
Hmm, so free to back up to, costs money to retrieve files. Putting my roughly terabyte of data from my Drobo on there would cost $12 to download if the Drobo fails. That doesn't sound to bad.

storage isn't free. It's 1c/GB/yr. so its about $10/yr for storing 1TB of files.