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My two cents is that there is no reason to _use_ Glacier as a backup strategy. Glacier's cost come for restoration: the more you restore and the faster you wan

My two cents is that there is no reason to _use_ Glacier as a backup strategy. Glacier's cost come for restoration: the more you restore and the faster you want to restore it, the more quickly costs rise. It's far better suited for a collection where you're pretty much most of it will never be restored but what you'll need to restore you don't know. Think video, art, music assets for projects. B2's retrieval is far, far lower cost and completely immediate for restoring an entire backup back to a server. If you're not careful that extra .5 cents you save will really cost you on a full restore.

Dylan16807 6y ago
If you can wait a few hours, the better comparison is probably Glacier Deep Archive, which is not $4/TB/month but $1/TB/month. Amazon wants to charge you $90/TB* to get data to the outside world, compared to B2's $10, but you can mitigate it in various ways. At the low end that's using a lightsail instance as a VPN, depending whether you think the TOS allows that. At the high end it's paying flexify.io $40 to move your data to B2, then paying B2 $10. There might be other ways to improve S3 egress costs. It's a very hard thing to search for. I only learned about flexify from this post. So if you have to restore less than half of your data each year, Glacier Deep storage will save you money. It's worth considering, unlike normal Glacier which is almost entirely downside. * There's also a $2.50/TB fee to get things out of Glacier, but that's dwarfed by the other costs.
- kevstev 6y ago
  Thanks for making me aware of this- I missed the Deep Glacier announcement last year it seems. Glacier is already cost effective as is, but this will make it even cheaper! I use this as an offsite backup- that as long as disaster does not strike, I will never use, and even if does, I can be patient about restoring.
kevstev 6y ago
With backups, my assumption is that you will never need to restore except in real "oh shit" moments- fire, electrical system zapping, etc- and if those moments happen, you are willing to pay. I have been using synology for 13 years now, and have thankfully never had to resort to using backups. This is for home use- which maybe I was wrongly assuming that most Synology users are. In a business context you might have a more routine need to recover backups and those costs become more tangible.

Dylan16807 6y ago

If you can wait a few hours, the better comparison is probably Glacier Deep Archive, which is not $4/TB/month but $1/TB/month. Amazon wants to charge you $90/TB* to get data to the outside world, compared to B2's $10, but you can mitigate it in various ways. At the low end that's using a lightsail instance as a VPN, depending whether you think the TOS allows that. At the high end it's paying flexify.io $40 to move your data to B2, then paying B2 $10. There might be other ways to improve S3 egress costs. It's a very hard thing to search for. I only learned about flexify from this post. So if you have to restore less than half of your data each year, Glacier Deep storage will save you money. It's worth considering, unlike normal Glacier which is almost entirely downside. * There's also a $2.50/TB fee to get things out of Glacier, but that's dwarfed by the other costs.

kevstev 6y ago
Thanks for making me aware of this- I missed the Deep Glacier announcement last year it seems. Glacier is already cost effective as is, but this will make it even cheaper! I use this as an offsite backup- that as long as disaster does not strike, I will never use, and even if does, I can be patient about restoring.

kevstev 6y ago

With backups, my assumption is that you will never need to restore except in real "oh shit" moments- fire, electrical system zapping, etc- and if those moments happen, you are willing to pay. I have been using synology for 13 years now, and have thankfully never had to resort to using backups. This is for home use- which maybe I was wrongly assuming that most Synology users are. In a business context you might have a more routine need to recover backups and those costs become more tangible.