Author Topic: Amazon Glacier  (Read 1854 times)

dfw_pilot

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Amazon Glacier
« on: February 27, 2016, 10:59:36 PM »
I've had an Amazon AWS account for a long time, mainly for use with Route53. There are, however, many uses for an AWS account, and the best part is, they are free to open, and then you only pay for what you use. One of the uses that is relevant to all of us here is backing up our files at an extremely low cost. Amazon Glacier is now down to .007? per gigabyte and the price drops as they add more users and servers.

I started today to backup my photo archive of roughly 70K photos that is about 400 gig in size. That will cost all of $2.80/mo and I view that as cheap insurance to reduce risk of loss. Glacier is different from a lot of online backup services in mainly that it is cheaper, but also that all your combined data can be uploaded from multiple sources and you only pay for what you use. Further, it's less of a backup solution and more of an archival tool. I want my kids to be able to get to our archived photos for decades to come, even if they don't have access to the physical disks I back them up on. This might be a great place to keep weather data archived, as well, but only your imagination is the limit.

The quick an dirty is to create a bucket in AWS S3. A bucket is your storage container space. Then upload your files or folders into your Amazon S3 bucket via an FTP tool. Finally, setup a rule that after x amount of days, say five or ten, it is transferred automatically into Glacier. S3 is live data storage, so it is 10x more expensive to keep files there whereas Glacier is much cheaper but requires 3-5 hours before one can restore and download a file. If you have programming skills, you can write code that will transfer directly to Glacier, but command line interfaces make me nervous about making a mistake, so the S3 transfer route is usually the easiest and safest path to take. I thought I'd share in the hopes this might help someone else.

dfw
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Blicj11

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Re: Amazon Glacier
« Reply #1 on: February 28, 2016, 03:32:22 AM »
I've been using AWS S3 to store the backups of my website for about 3 years now. It has been reliable and cheap. I've had to do a full restore from it and it worked perfectly. Sounds like I need to look into Glacier now.
Blick


dfw_pilot

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Glacier
« Reply #2 on: February 28, 2016, 04:17:58 AM »
I highly recommend it. You already have S3, so the transfer of your objects to Glacier would be trivial -- just define a new Lifecycle rule to transfer your assets into Glacier.

As an example, you could make your latest website changes available in S3 but keep the bulk of your backup in Glacier which reduces the amount of data exposed to the much higher rates of S3 storage.
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