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Does anybody know what the retrieval fees will likely look like? I've been wary of most of the "cloud archival" solutions because while they're cheap to put dat

Does anybody know what the retrieval fees will likely look like? I've been wary of most of the "cloud archival" solutions because while they're cheap to put data into, they seem charge you a billion dollars to actually retrieve it.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
FWIW, this is still an ideal model for backup storage: If your more regular backup model is robust and your network is well-secured, you'll never need retrieval. And if you need it, you need it, and it's justifiable to spend big to save your business.
- penagwin 8y ago
  I'm mostly just evaluating it for personal/hobby backups (few terabytes), I know business will for sure look at it differently.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    Same here. As a company you can go "we need this to save our asses, I don't care if it costs $50k in a 4 person company", but personally I kind of do care about the cost for retrieval... I've been comparing cloud storage prices to hard drive prices for years now. My first thought when seeing the storage prices was "huh, that might actually be worth it", but depending on the retrieval costs, you might still want to roll your own no matter the storage costs. For private use, I am (was?) planning a variant of this as soon as I am finished doing a server migration: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7rjcdn/home_made_non_gmo_cruelty_free_offsite_backup/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7rjcdn/home_ma...
    - z3t4 8y ago
      Also compare with ftp and storage vps. Cheapest ive seen is 1$ per TB /month.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        A cheap storage VPS won't give you 11 9s of durability, though. Chances are a single drive failure will cause data loss.
        z3t4 8y ago
        You can hash the data at regular intervals to make sure it's intact. For example adding this command to crontab: /usr/bin/md5sum --quiet -c md5sum.chk
        lucb1e 8y ago
        It's your backup, not your primary system. The odds that more than one drive fails within the same, say, week, is probably perfectly acceptable for most people.
- lreeves 8y ago
  Backup plans don't mean much unless you fully test a restoration process periodically though.
  - penagwin 8y ago
    I'd be confident with periodically testing just little random parts. For me this is a "last resort backup", costs little to keep around, and god-forbid we ever need it. BUT that means we need to account for the case were we do need it! And if it's going to cost too much then there's no point in the backup anyway.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      I would generally agree. First of all, you're going to test a lot of your restore processes with backups which are closer to home: You should make sure your VMs can all restore from your onsite (or just less icy) backups, for instance. As long as you're confident in that, the only thing you need to test with "ice cold" storage is that you can successfully restore a single VM from it, since you know all of your VMs can be restored.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

FWIW, this is still an ideal model for backup storage: If your more regular backup model is robust and your network is well-secured, you'll never need retrieval. And if you need it, you need it, and it's justifiable to spend big to save your business.

penagwin 8y ago
I'm mostly just evaluating it for personal/hobby backups (few terabytes), I know business will for sure look at it differently.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Same here. As a company you can go "we need this to save our asses, I don't care if it costs $50k in a 4 person company", but personally I kind of do care about the cost for retrieval... I've been comparing cloud storage prices to hard drive prices for years now. My first thought when seeing the storage prices was "huh, that might actually be worth it", but depending on the retrieval costs, you might still want to roll your own no matter the storage costs. For private use, I am (was?) planning a variant of this as soon as I am finished doing a server migration: https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7rjcdn/home_made_non_gmo_cruelty_free_offsite_backup/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7rjcdn/home_ma...
  - z3t4 8y ago
    Also compare with ftp and storage vps. Cheapest ive seen is 1$ per TB /month.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      A cheap storage VPS won't give you 11 9s of durability, though. Chances are a single drive failure will cause data loss.
      - z3t4 8y ago
        You can hash the data at regular intervals to make sure it's intact. For example adding this command to crontab: /usr/bin/md5sum --quiet -c md5sum.chk
      - lucb1e 8y ago
        It's your backup, not your primary system. The odds that more than one drive fails within the same, say, week, is probably perfectly acceptable for most people.
lreeves 8y ago
Backup plans don't mean much unless you fully test a restoration process periodically though.
- penagwin 8y ago
  I'd be confident with periodically testing just little random parts. For me this is a "last resort backup", costs little to keep around, and god-forbid we ever need it. BUT that means we need to account for the case were we do need it! And if it's going to cost too much then there's no point in the backup anyway.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I would generally agree. First of all, you're going to test a lot of your restore processes with backups which are closer to home: You should make sure your VMs can all restore from your onsite (or just less icy) backups, for instance. As long as you're confident in that, the only thing you need to test with "ice cold" storage is that you can successfully restore a single VM from it, since you know all of your VMs can be restored.