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Ice Box Pro: The best of Dropbox and Amazon Glacier combined
- reitzensteinm 14y agoThis sounds great, but since this is using your own AWS account, there is a very serious poison pill; Glacier only lets you retrieve 0.17% of your data for free per day. Beyond that, you get charged based on your peak hour of retrieval. How much? $7.20 per gigabyte for your highest hour (minus a negligible free allowance if you're using it in this manner). i.e. the cost to restore m gigabytes over n hours is: $7.20 * m / n I'm sure Ice Box Pro will have warnings in place, so nobody will get a $350 bill by accident by restoring a 50 gig account in an hour. But for disaster recovery, the time will come to decide between a large bill or a very slow retrieval. Pricing details are here (though quite difficult to follow): http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_retrieve_for_free http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_retr...
- amalag 14y agoIf they built something to warn you when you hit the 0.17% (or whatever the magic number is) it would be great, or just retrieve according to the limit for you.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoTo retrieve all your files at the free rate would take 588 days. Glacier is not a product geared towards consumers, and the free tier is basically negligible for this use case. You're right that an upfront retrieval speed vs cost interface is the correct way to handle it, preferably on first use.
- amalag 14y agoWow didn't realize it was that slow. I think you are right, it is for companies who don't mind paying if they have a data loss incident. It does support AWS import/export so one can fedex them harddrives if someone needs the data fast.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoAlso, if you are a company that does hourly backups and keeps them for a year, you can grab back 14 of them per day, which is plenty. That seems to be the canonical use case.
- rm999 14y agoI'm interested in the service as a consumer. I keep backups of my important files in my apartment, so I consider data loss a very rare but catastrophic event. Glacier is a reasonably priced insurance for my important files.
- jlgreco 14y agoExactly, I am considering this for backup in case of any sort of catastrophic event. Fire, robbery, etc. Events where a bit of money for data retrieval will really be the least of my worries that day (Might it even be possible to get homeowners/renters insurance to cover retrieval costs? Something to consider maybe.)
- bambax 14y agoExactly, me too. I have multiple backups of my image and video files in my home (~250 Go, growing fast), and I rotate the disks in a vault in the basement. It's very very unlikely that I will lose any file, but it can happen if my whole house burns down or gets robbed (vault included). Glacier is relevant in that case for me as a consumer.
- rlpb 14y agoThis is exactly my use case, and I've written glacier-cli to integrate with git-annex in order to fulfil it.
- josephlord 14y agoFor family photos and unedited family videos I could probably actually wait that long in the even of a catestrophic loss of all my local copies. I'd prefer the speed/cost interface to be at download time. Give the opportunity to reorder the download sequence to prioritise some parts and probably transfer to S3 so the local computer doesn't need to be running throughout the whole data trickle. That's a useful service that I can't be bothered to build at the moment.
- Evbn 14y agoAWS free tier has always been designed as a "temprary free sample" not as a "free for small users" like AppEngine.
- josephlord 14y agoI haven't looked at the details but is it cheaper to add a massive amount of dummy data for the duration you need to download all your real content?
- reitzensteinm 14y agoNo - there is a 3 month minimum for data. You have to add 20 times as much data as you have to download for free over a month, 600 for a day, or 14400 for an hour. Multiplied by 3c a gig.
- biturd 14y agoThat seems too costly for even large businesses that don't care. When you lose data, you want it back fast. In this case, the faster you take it back the more it costs. I wonder why they don't use S3. Is it not reliable enough? The charging infrastructure at least is simpler to figure out.
- StavrosK 14y agoSure, it's too costly for large businesses, but it's not too costly for me, I just want to restore my 100 GB photo/video collection if all other backups fail, I don't care if it takes two days as long as it's all there.
- Spooky23 14y agoThere is a huge market for data that needs to be retained indefinitely, or for some long period of time. Oftentimes this is related to compliance. The frequency that the data is accessed is incredibly small -- or even zero. For example, in several states, all records relating to a minor in state custody, an adoption, or receiving certain nbenefits must be kept for 26 years after the minor turns 18. Today, states are either storing this data on tape, or paying some government contractor to do it for them -- at an expense several times that of Glacier. Another example is litigation holds. One former employer was forced to hold around a petabyte of data 7 years for a complex civil suit, because... A judge said so. In that case, the high cost of retrieval may be a benefit, because the plaintiff would be footing the bill.
- rolleiflex 14y agoI love the idea, but besides the retrieval fees involved that you're not disclosing, I wonder if people will grasp the fact that the files they are putting into the icebox folder are not reachable with opening the same folder and looking into it—instead you need to go to a web site to find them. This is rather disorienting for a non-technical user as the way of putting files in gives a false sense of immediacy to a future retrieval availability.
- forensic 14y agoThere's this nefarious sense of: Give me your data so I can sell it back to you!
- smeagol 14y agohey guys, i built this with a friend and didn't expect it to get posted to HN already. we just got it approved and i accidentally hit our Like button before we were even ready. my friends immediately commented on the story so we just said, what the hey :-) in any case, it just "launched" today, was only meant for friends to test out, and yes i agree we need to write more copy. to address some concerns: - this is really only meant for developers at the moment; i.e. those who actually know their way around AWS. if and when we decide to take payments and provide a service, you can expect a lot more documentation and support. we have no desire to dupe normal folks. we built this for ourselves and really only expected friends to try it out first. - you don't need to go to your AWS console to get your files. once a file archives, you can click a button to download it back to your Dropbox - putting in warnings about the quota is a great idea! we'll do that ASAP. keep the feedback coming, we really appreciate it and wanna build something useful for everyone.
- silverlake 14y agoPerhaps you could offer a service where everyone saves their files under your corporate account. When 1 person needs to restore, it will mostly fit within the free download % of the total. So if 10 people store 1 TB each, you can download 500GB/month for free. It's like insurance. We all pay a small amount to cover when one person has a problem.
- smeagol 14y agowe hope to get to that very soon! most likely, we'll just keep a small data center. something to get around the bandwidth limitation and availability. we would definitely need to charge then in order to cover those costs.
- dj2stein9 14y agoWhat's not very clear to me is if my Glacier files are a subset of my Dropbox files, or a separate datastore. I only have 2GB of Dropbox space because I never upgraded. But I have about 100GB of archive data I'd probably throw into Amazon Glacier if it were convenient. Do I need to open a 100GB Dropbox account before using IceBox?
- akmiller 14y agoI'd like to see someone provide a service in a similar vein to this but just for photos. What I'm thinking is a service that uses Glacier to store my photo library and some type of front end service (like dropbox) that keeps a low res version of that photo along with some meta data about it. My reasoning for this is that we all build up pretty significant photo libraries (mines already over 60GB) and I'm always trying to make sure I have them backed up. I currently use a paid plan at Dropbox so I can put them all up there but it's kind of a waste since I hardly ever pull many of them down again. Every once in awhile I browse through them looking for certain pictures that I might need to get a copy of (which is why I'd need the low res copies easy to access/browse) and then be able to choose which ones to pull down from glacier. The other good thing about a service like that is the need is not typically immediate. Maybe I'll look into building this since it's something I'd love to have for myself!
- amalag 14y agoThat does sound like a good idea! Sounds perfect for S3, can just store the low-res/thumbnails in S3 for browsing via a web page, then retrieve an occasional photo if necessary through glacier.
- jmathai 14y agoHave a look at The OpenPhoto Project. Hosted version: https://openphoto.me https://openphoto.me Project page: http://theopenphotoproject.org http://theopenphotoproject.org Source: https://github.com/photo https://github.com/photo
- smeagol 14y agosoon... :-) akmiller, can we talk offline? i'd love to hear more about your ideas. (we actually have photos in mind.) just email anything@iceboxpro.com
- matthew-wegner 14y agoI use Backblaze--$50/year--primarily for photos. My photo drive sits at around 900GB currently. It's entirely in Backblaze, in case it ever explodes and local backups fail. I let it handle other drives, too, although I exclude my media/music/download/etc drive for simplicity.
- erenemre 14y agoTrying it now (800mb is uploading). This tool is great for me because the data I'm backing up is something I'll need to access maybe twice a year, or less. But I still need to have this data backed up somewhere. I love how it's as simple as Dropbox. Set it up once, the rest is just drag and drop.
- madrona 14y agoI'm not sure you can use competitors' logos like that.
- smeagol 14y agoall Dropbox apps require approval. someone from Dropbox actually signed up, reviewed IceBox, and approved it. we have no intentions of competing with Dropbox. (like that's even possible.) if we get a complaint, we're more than happy to comply. we love both Dropbox and Amazon Glacier so we decided to pair them. i'm almost certain Dropbox will eventually add a similar feature soon--we may just be beating them to the punch.
- randomchars 14y agoYou might want to make that logo a link to Dropbox since it's required in their guidelines. https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/branding https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/branding
- randomchars 14y agoThey're not competitiors, they're augmenting Dropbox. From the Dropbox brading guide ( https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/branding https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/branding ): > you can use the Dropbox logo in marketing material to show your app's Dropbox integration, but it should never be modified and should always refer to our service. If you are using the logo on a website, it should link to https://www.dropbox.com https://www.dropbox.com. So they're allowed to use it, but it must link to the Dropbox website. It doesn't so it's actually violating the guidelines.
- smoody 14y agoIs the data stored on Glacier encrypted?
- xxiao 14y agogosh, i thought about this when glacier was out, glad someone is doing that.
- RKearney 14y agoFYI Anyone can see your name, email, and AWS ID/Access Key. The games on Stripe's CTF were more secure than this site... EDIT: Looks like it was just patched. Still managed to get a few dozen AWS keys though.
- smeagol 14y agosorry about that. like i said before, we accidentally "launched" today. be nice? if anyone's concerned about your AWS key, just destroy your IAM user and create a new one. that's what it was designed for.
- dfc 14y agoYou should think about sending an email to all of your users. I realize its a tough call pointing out a problem so early but it might also be a good way to garner user's trust.
- smeagol 14y agogood idea. actually, we'll just wipe them and force new ones.
- zacharyvoase 14y agoBut you still should let your users know that their old keys have been compromised.
- adgar2 14y agoDude... this guy clearly doesn't understand security. I'm glad you're trying to help him out... but your time will be better spent elsewhere.
- interg12 14y agoWell that's not a very helpful attitude. People should be instructive rather than discourage someone from pursuing a reasonable project.
- dfc 14y agoFor an open source alternative (and my tool of choice) check out git-annex with s3[1]. joehy has a todo for git-annex and glacier[2] and someone has already submitted the beginings of a patch. When i first heard of Glacier I was excited about the possibilty of using it for a backend to git-annex, but then I read cpercival's discussion of glacier[3,4]. [1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/using_Amazon_S3/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/using_Amazon_S3/ [2] http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/special_remote_for_amazon_glacier/ http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/special_remote_for_amaz... [3] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-why-tarsnap-doesnt-use-glacier.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-why-tarsnap-doesn... [4] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-thoughts-on-glacier-pricing.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-thoughts-on-glaci... EDIT: Removed comment about competition.
- StavrosK 14y agoThis isn't a Dropbox competitor, it uses Dropbox. It's just an addon.
- callmevlad 14y agoIf I understand correctly, Icebox is not a direct competitor to Dropbox. If anything, it enhances the Dropbox experience, so you could argue that it could help Dropbox get more users/customers.
- rlpb 14y agoI've written glacier integration with git-annex and it's fully functional. Details in [2]. The Glacier retrieval pricing uncertainty just means that I store less in Glacier - but for critical data where the paid retrieval cost is worth it, I happily "git annex copy --to=glacier".
- biturd 14y agoAnything that uses Dropbox as the middleman scares me a bit. Dropbox scares me a bit. It silently ignores a lot of meta data , restores files with dates that aren't what the original was ( last I checked ) and has corrupted a few Mac OS X sparse bundles beyond repair. There's a great app called Arc that handles all of Mac OS X meta data perfectly, works with the relative ease of Dropbox, and backs up to S3 at great savings. De-duplication and other "smarts" are all there. It's sort of like a Time Machine that you can point to S3.
- encoderer 14y agoThis is a little OT, but I was thinking about putting together a weekend (read: week) project that would offer a cloud service (details aren't important) but require a user to add an AWS key. The idea is that it would use the free micro instance Amazon gives a user. The benefit I see is that customers would have total visibility into their own data, and, of course, it's very cheap to run a system like that. I'd love to hear any opinions anybody might have about it.
- jmathai 14y agoThat's a subset of what we're trying to do with The OpenPhoto Project. http://theopenphotoproject.org http://theopenphotoproject.org
- brackishlake 14y agoDo not go near this software, ever. http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-information-to-10-minute-old-startups/ http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-informat...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- alinspired 14y agoGreat Idea, although to realy archive terabytes with a relatively small dropbox account you'd have to do it in 10-100 steps.. Recovering it via dropbox would be even more challenging.
- oron 14y agoI actually thought about it some time ago and even started working on a prototype, got dropjar.com for that, but after seeing how low companies like backblaze sell unlimited backup for ... I figured it's a hard sell. Good luck with icebox.
- ikken 14y agoDon't give your data to this site until they fix this: http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-information-to-10-minute-old-startups/ http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-informat...
- randomchars 14y agoIt's already fixed.
- hnriot 14y agoAnd even when it's fixed after the way they responded, don't trust them with your data or anything at all.
- almost 14y agoWow, I've been working on almost the exact same thing! Except I'm charging a yearly fee instead of using the users own AWS account, this makes it easier for users without an AWS account and also means you don't have to worry about the crazy Glacier fee structure. Try it out if you want, 1GB accounts are free at the moment: https://www.tidy.io/ https://www.tidy.io/
- randomchars 14y agoSome feedback about the landing page: It doesn't show any pricing. I don't want to sign up for something just to see the pricing.
- almost 14y agoThanks for the feedback! The landing page not being finished was why I'd been waiting to launch, wish I'd got it done sooner now! EDIT: Until I sort out the landing page here's the current pricing: 50GB is $25/year, 100GB is $40/year and 500GB is $189
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- damncabbage 14y agoThe security problem that was found (now fixed) is less of an issue than the responses they gave afterwards: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619652 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619652
- alanh 14y agoMy Dropbox isn’t big enough for the file I would want to send to Glacier. Does Amazon provide a fairly decent interface? Or, failing that, are there clients that can work with AWS Glacier already, the way some FTP clients can speak to AWS S3?