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I've spent several hours reading about this and talking with colleagues, reading the (really great) HN threads on the topic and doing a bunch of math - and I've

I've spent several hours reading about this and talking with colleagues, reading the (really great) HN threads on the topic and doing a bunch of math - and I've come to the conclusion that rsync.net/backblaze/tarsnap/crashplan probably don't have too much to worry about for _most_ use cases. The wonky pricing on retrieval makes this inordinately complex to price out for the average consumer who will be doing restores of large amounts of data. The lack of easy consumer flexibility for restores also is problematic for the use case of "Help, I've lost my 150 GB Aperture Library / 1 TB Hard Drive" The 4 Hour retrieval time makes it a non starter for those of us who frequently recover files (sometime from a different machine) off the website. The cost is too much for >50 Terabyte Archives - Those users will be likely be doing multi-site Iron Mountain backups on LTO-5 Tapes. After 100 Terabytes, the cost of the drives is quickly amortized and ROI on the tapes is measured in about a month. The new business model that Amazon may have created overnight though, and beats everyone on price convenience, is "Off-Site Archiving of low-volume low value Documents" - Think Family Pictures. Your average shutterbug probably has on the order of 50 GBytes of photos (give or take) - is it worth $6/year for them to keep a safe offline archive of them? Every single one of those people should be signing up for the first software package that gives them a nice consumer-friendly GUI to backup their picasa/iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom photo library. Let's all learn a lesson from [Edit Mat, one t] Honan.

tedunangst 14y ago
It's Mat. (I didn't recognize the name, but when spelled as Mat, I immediately know "oh, the guy hacked for his three letter twitter handle")
ensignavenger 14y ago
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.
- unreal37 14y 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.
  - hga 14y 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.
- ghshephard 14y 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.
- deleted 14y ago

tedunangst 14y ago

It's Mat. (I didn't recognize the name, but when spelled as Mat, I immediately know "oh, the guy hacked for his three letter twitter handle")

ensignavenger 14y ago

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.

unreal37 14y 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.
- hga 14y 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.
ghshephard 14y 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.
deleted 14y ago