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Last time I used Glacier, it was a separate product from S3 and had its own API. You had to upload pre-prepared "tapes" for backups. You couldn't mutate an exi

Last time I used Glacier, it was a separate product from S3 and had its own API. You had to upload pre-prepared "tapes" for backups. You couldn't mutate an existing backup, you had to create a new one. And frequently fetching and/or deleting existing "tapes" (backups) would cost you money (more so than the original cost of the backup). That meant you couldn't just ZIP it all up, backup the latest version and the delete the previous one to avoid being doubly charged for storage either. Basically at time of archiving you needed to determine what was already archived and create a new bundle with only what's new, and archive that only. In the same spirit, restore meant piecing together multiple such tapes into a full restore-set. Absolutely terrible. It was like having traditional backup-software constraints, but none of the software-support. If Amazon has improved on that now, good for them, but I figured they probably had to if they wanted any users at all.

scarface74 8y ago
Honestly, I’ve never used the Glacier api directly. I’ve only used it as part of a lifecycle policy where objects were stored in S3 and then using the console to have AWS migrate data after a certain amount of time. My offsite backup would only be accessed in the case of catastrophic failure - my primary and local backup data is unavailable. Data transfer does cost more but if I had that type of catastrophe, worrying about getting my movies back for my Plex server would be of little concern. Everything that I would care about - source code, photos, documents etc are stored other places. That’s another strike against Backblaze backups (not B2 based backups). When we were in between residences last year - we left our apartment when the lease was up and stayed in an extended stay waiting for our house to be built, my main computer was offline for 5 months. One more month and my Backblaze backup would have been deleted. I forgot about it and I restarted my computer before I reconnected my external drive - so my backup from my external drive was erased from Backblaze as soon as I came back online. It wasn’t catastrophic but irritating. Luckily I have gigabit upload.

scarface74 8y ago

Honestly, I’ve never used the Glacier api directly. I’ve only used it as part of a lifecycle policy where objects were stored in S3 and then using the console to have AWS migrate data after a certain amount of time. My offsite backup would only be accessed in the case of catastrophic failure - my primary and local backup data is unavailable. Data transfer does cost more but if I had that type of catastrophe, worrying about getting my movies back for my Plex server would be of little concern. Everything that I would care about - source code, photos, documents etc are stored other places. That’s another strike against Backblaze backups (not B2 based backups). When we were in between residences last year - we left our apartment when the lease was up and stayed in an extended stay waiting for our house to be built, my main computer was offline for 5 months. One more month and my Backblaze backup would have been deleted. I forgot about it and I restarted my computer before I reconnected my external drive - so my backup from my external drive was erased from Backblaze as soon as I came back online. It wasn’t catastrophic but irritating. Luckily I have gigabit upload.