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0 pointsensignavenger13y ago0 comments

Online backup for my photos and other data was my initial thought, but I'm afraid it would cost too much to do a restore- if I store 3 TB of photos/documents/etc for 2 years, then have a house fire (local backup destroyed), I want to be able to restore my data to my new computer as quickly as my Internet connection will let me, and I don't want to be stuck with a huge bill for retrieval on top of all the other expenses relevant to such a disaster. AWS should make the monthly retrieval allowance should roll over and accumulate from month to month, so that I can do occasional large retrievals.

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unreal3713y ago

re: "I want to be able to restore my data to my new computer as quickly as my Internet connection will let me"

Really? Why? If you have say 10 years of home pictures/movies, and you know they are 100% safe in Amazon Glacier, why do you need them all on your new computer as fast as possible? I don't understand why its such a rush.

If it's a rush, you pay the fee. If you can afford to wait a month or two or three to get all the data back for free, you trickle your pics/movies back to your new computer one day at a time.

It seems Amazon charges by the peak hour, so if you can throttle your retrieval so that it takes 3 or 4 days to get the data back, the fee would be a lot less.

A 5 GB per hour download would cost $36 for the month. You could download your entire 3TB files in less than a month for $36. So I don't think that's a crazy fee when your computer was destroyed by a fire...

To get your data back in a week requires 17GB per hour, which is $128. Not unreasonable either considering the urgency and the circumstances.

hga13y ago

Agreed. Let me add that a lot of us are living under severe data cap or overage regimes, for me and my parents it's 2 AT&T plain DSL lines, each with 150 GB/month free, go over that 2-3 times and you start paying $10/50 GB/month on a line.

So uploading as well as downloading would have to be throttled. But this sounds like a superb way to store all those pictures and movies of the grandchildren, especially for those who don't have a son with a LTO drive ^_^. All the other alternatives are lousy or a lot more expensive.

ghshephard13y ago

I do my online backups to BackBlaze. $3.69/month and It backs up both my Internal 256 GB SSD and my External (portable) 1TB HD that I keep all my Aperture "Referenced Masters" on.

A Full Document restore isn't done over the Internet, I have Backblaze fedex me a USB hard drive - though, unless something has gone really, really wrong (Building burned down?) - I have a within-a-week old or so SuperDuper Image of my Hard Drive.

My Use Case for Glacier is Dropping a 10-20 year archive every 5 years. 50 Gigabytes of data will cost me $120 to leave their for the next 20 years. I can make good use of that.

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