Tag: Amazon S3

Amazon Glacier for the Home User

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Backup Backup Backup - And Test Restores

Earlier this week, Amazon announced Glacier, which is long-term storage that costs one cent a gigabyte per month. This compares to the 12 cents a gigabyte per month for S3. The basic difference is that Glacier can take between 3 and 5 hours to retrieve data, and S3 is instantaneous.

“Amazon S3 is a durable, secure, simple, and fast storage service designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Use Amazon S3 if you need low latency or frequent access to your data. Use Amazon Glacier if low storage cost is paramount, your data is rarely retrieved, and data retrieval times of several hours are acceptable.”

But, let’s go to the pricing. As a home user, we’re assuming you have less than 50TB.

  • Storage
    • Glacier – 0.01 per GB/month
    • S3 – 0.12 per GB/month
  • Data Transfers In – Free on All
  • Data Transfer Out - Glacier and S3 both use the same pricing.
    • 1st GB free
    • Next 10GB, 0.12 a GB
    • Next 40GB, 0.09 a GB
  • Requests
    • Glacier
      • Data Retrievals are Free, however, Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month.
      • If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days

Amazon has promised that there will be an upcoming feature to export from S3 to Glacier based on data lifecycle policies. The details on how this will work aren’t 100% available, but we could imagine offloading from S3 to Glacier based on age. So, you keep the last 1-2 months of data on S3, and the older backups on Glacier. It would allow you to save a good deal of money for backups.

Not everyone, for that matter, needs high availability…especially if you are keeping something that is infrequently modified. For example, the family photo album. You can keep your local backups, and for 1 cent a month, you get a copy that you can access in an emergency.

What we’re missing is that many reports indicated that retrieval is potentially costly. But we found it equivalent to S3, only slower.

But, what would you use this for? We’d like to hear your thoughts.

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Thinking about Online Backup

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Image representing Dropbox as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

Earlier, we were reading LifeHacker‘s Five Best Online Backup Tools. We’ve been in the market for an Online Backup solution. Right now, we use Dropbox.

Dropbox offers a free 2GB account that syncs a directory on your computer to their server. It offers a paid option for a monthly charge of $9.99/50GB or $19.99/100GB, which is a bit too much for our needs. It is a great tool that we use every day, but is, in our opinion, for our most used files…ones often changed. It offers clients for every operating system, which is important.

We need a solution that will work with Linux…our primary operating system. Thus, Mozy or Carbonite is not an option. Assuming we’re keeping to the Lifehacker list, that leaves CrashPlan and Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk will be changing its pricing scheme this week, according to its blog.

  • Jungle Disk Simply Backup: $2/month, with 5GB of free storage
  • Jungle Disk Desktop Edition: $3/month, with 5GB of free storage
  • Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition: $4/month, with 10GB of free storage
  • Jungle Disk Server Edition: $5/month, with 10GB of free storage

The new plan includes a minimum 5GB of storage. Beyond that, you have your choice of cloud storage providers, either Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. Both charge 15 cents per GB used, but S3 charges for bandwidth as well.

CrashPlan offers unlimited storage, either an individual unlimited plan for $3.50 a month if you purchase 3 years worth, or a family plan for $5.00 a month if you purchase 3 years worth. It is $4.50 or $8.33 if you buy a single year plan.

At the moment, while we like the idea of online backup, everything we have that is critical fits into the 2GB Dropbox partition and beyond that may not be worth it. Everything else…well, try encrypting it and sending it somewhere safe. Like a safety deposit box…the house of a friend in a different state, or even have your parents store it for you in your childhood home. Mom is certainly a cheap option.

If your friend/relative is willing to trade with you, you can store their emergency backups too.

But what do you think? Should we go for online backup?

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