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Amazon Glacier has some small letter hidden costs that can pile up to THOUSANDS of dollars quickly if you retrieve the data "too fast". It can happen with only

by alecco 13y ago

Amazon Glacier has some small letter hidden costs that can pile up to THOUSANDS of dollars quickly if you retrieve the data "too fast". It can happen with only a few hundred gigabytes. I fail to see how it is useful as a backup service. This got me into serious trouble. Built a whole backup system around it and now it is not what it was supposed to be.

matthewmacleod 13y ago
I mean, it's not like Amazon suffers from opaque pricing. The offer with Glacier is exactly what they said it would be, and the trade off for lower per-gig costs is the toll on retrieving the data. That's still perfectly reasonable IMO; I have a couple of terabytes backed up, and worst-case if I actually need to hit glacier, it'll cost me a few hundred dollars.
- lotharrr 13y ago
  In general I agree, but the problem with Glacier's retrieval pricing in particular is that it's quoted as dollars-per-byte (like all their other prices), but in fact it's really dollars-per-(peak-bytes-per-second). It's easy to get a nasty surprise. If I pull enough to saturate my 28Mbps DSL downstream for 4 hours (~51GB), I'd pay nearly $100 that month, not 51GB*($0.01/GB)=$0.51. You really need a Glacier-aware restore program that is told your maximum budget, knows the pricing formula, and carefully schedules the retrievals to keep the peak rate below that threshold.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    It's for long term offsite backups/archival. If you need to retrieve lots of data from it on a regular basis (e.g. because of a single dead drive) you're doing something wrong. If our office burns down, and I had our offsite backups in Glacier, the retrieval costs are peanuts compared to cost of losing the data (going out of business). If my home burns down, and I have my offsite backups in Glacier, a few hundred dollars to retrieve data would be nothing compared to the emotional loss of years worth of photos etc. But I have triple copies at home - minimum - of almost all of my data (mirrored drives + regular snapshots on a third drive; and a lot of the stuff is also synced to/from one or more other computers), and similar setups at work: An offsite backup is last resort.
Kudos 13y ago
Amazon's data transfer pricing is awful. I have no idea how Droplr and Cloudapp make money serving files directly from S3.
- vl 13y ago
  Biggest guys peer with Amazon, biggish guys get special pricing. Other burn through VC money.
vertex-four 13y ago
The thing is, it's not marketed as a backup service. It's an archive service. If you have business requirements to keep data around for a certain length of time, and things will go very badly (legally speaking) if the data disappears, you might decide to have Amazon store it in Glacier. You likely wouldn't ever access it unless a lawyer or auditor wanted it; if your systems failed, you'd hopefully be restoring from a short-term backup rather than long-term archives.

by alecco 13y ago

matthewmacleod 13y ago

I mean, it's not like Amazon suffers from opaque pricing. The offer with Glacier is exactly what they said it would be, and the trade off for lower per-gig costs is the toll on retrieving the data. That's still perfectly reasonable IMO; I have a couple of terabytes backed up, and worst-case if I actually need to hit glacier, it'll cost me a few hundred dollars.

lotharrr 13y ago
In general I agree, but the problem with Glacier's retrieval pricing in particular is that it's quoted as dollars-per-byte (like all their other prices), but in fact it's really dollars-per-(peak-bytes-per-second). It's easy to get a nasty surprise. If I pull enough to saturate my 28Mbps DSL downstream for 4 hours (~51GB), I'd pay nearly $100 that month, not 51GB*($0.01/GB)=$0.51. You really need a Glacier-aware restore program that is told your maximum budget, knows the pricing formula, and carefully schedules the retrievals to keep the peak rate below that threshold.
- vidarh 13y ago
  It's for long term offsite backups/archival. If you need to retrieve lots of data from it on a regular basis (e.g. because of a single dead drive) you're doing something wrong. If our office burns down, and I had our offsite backups in Glacier, the retrieval costs are peanuts compared to cost of losing the data (going out of business). If my home burns down, and I have my offsite backups in Glacier, a few hundred dollars to retrieve data would be nothing compared to the emotional loss of years worth of photos etc. But I have triple copies at home - minimum - of almost all of my data (mirrored drives + regular snapshots on a third drive; and a lot of the stuff is also synced to/from one or more other computers), and similar setups at work: An offsite backup is last resort.

Kudos 13y ago

Amazon's data transfer pricing is awful. I have no idea how Droplr and Cloudapp make money serving files directly from S3.

vl 13y ago
Biggest guys peer with Amazon, biggish guys get special pricing. Other burn through VC money.

vertex-four 13y ago

The thing is, it's not marketed as a backup service. It's an archive service. If you have business requirements to keep data around for a certain length of time, and things will go very badly (legally speaking) if the data disappears, you might decide to have Amazon store it in Glacier. You likely wouldn't ever access it unless a lawyer or auditor wanted it; if your systems failed, you'd hopefully be restoring from a short-term backup rather than long-term archives.