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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 cost
by 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 agoIn 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 agoIt'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.