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0 pointsDylan1680713y ago0 comments

This is so confusing. So apparently if you spend the entire month retrieving the data at 1.6MB/s it only costs $40 plus transfer fees? And more importantly, how do you throttle your retrieval?

Edit: So I'm working through a scenario in my head and trying to figure out how charging based on the peak hour isn't completely ridiculous.

I have 8GB stored to try out the system. This costs a whopping dollar per year. One day I decide to test out the restore feature. So I go tell Amazon to get my files and wait a few hours. When Amazon is ready, I hit download. I'm on a relatively fast cable connection so the download finishes in an hour. I look at the data transfer prices and expect to be charged one dollar.

But I didn't take into account this 'peak hour' method. I just used roughly 8GB/hour over the minimal free retrieval. This gets multiplied out times 24 hours and 30 days to cost 8 * 720 * $0.01 = $57. Fifty-seven times my annual budget because I downloaded my data too quickly after waiting hours for Amazon to get ready.

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freehunter13y ago

If you're in a corporate environment, you'd likely have a network admin group that could throttle your connection to them. Or you'd be using a custom-designed front-end that would throttle it. Or if you're SOHO, you could set up QoS rules on your router to throttle it.

Realistically though, this service might not be for you if fast and cheap retrieval of your data is important. The importance here is cheap storage, not transfer. They could reasonably expect that you'd only retrieve this data once or twice, if ever, and cost won't be deterrent. Say, if your data center burns down and your company is moving to a new office.

Dylan16807OP13y ago

Oh I totally understand that people are going to be willing to pay more after a disaster to get files back. But realistically, if there is a large enough volume of files to bother amazon then they're going to need day(s) to download. If they rate-limited by day then the price would only reach a couple years of storage. The hourly thing is only going to bite minor retrieval events, and it is going to bite them amazingly hard.

freehunter13y ago

My department (information security) was actually just discussing this service this morning at our morning meeting. We've been looking into backup services for our security monitoring appliance beyond our datacenter and DR site. These backups would need to persist for a year according to PCI/SOX compliance, and if we needed to show data to an auditor, we wouldn't need the entire log. In fact, we'd likely not even need 5% of it. Most likely, we'd only need to pull a day (maybe two) from the logs.

I can imagine our media services group talking about the same thing, how to keep master files of their product pictures/videos where they'd only need to grab a file or two here or there (if at all).

Amazon seems to be pushing this as a file dump where retrieval of the files is exceedingly rare. They don't want you to use it as a hard drive, they want you to use it as a magnetic tape drive.

Dylan16807OP13y ago

It's not that I want to use this as hot storage, it's that I would like to be able to test my backups once or twice a year.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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freehunter13y ago

Dylan16807OP13y ago

freehunter13y ago

I can imagine our media services group talking about the same thing, how to keep master files of their product pictures/videos where they'd only need to grab a file or two here or there (if at all).

Amazon seems to be pushing this as a file dump where retrieval of the files is exceedingly rare. They don't want you to use it as a hard drive, they want you to use it as a magnetic tape drive.

Dylan16807OP13y ago

It's not that I want to use this as hot storage, it's that I would like to be able to test my backups once or twice a year.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse