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Be careful with Amazon Glacier, retrieving data usually leads to a rude awakening. Glacier bills on "peak retrieval rate". Say you have a 100mbps connection an

Be careful with Amazon Glacier, retrieving data usually leads to a rude awakening. Glacier bills on "peak retrieval rate". Say you have a 100mbps connection and 1TB of data. Retrieving all 1TB over a 24-hour period at an even rate will cost you ~$300. Not great, but not awful. But this calculation is wrong. The real story is much worse. You're not retrieving your data directly from Glacier. You're restoring it to S3, then downloading your files from there. Amazon is going to bill you at the peak retrieval rate _from Glacier to S3_. If you're lucky and it takes four hours (and at an even rate), you'll rack up _$2000_ in charges. This has happened to me and to many others. The solution is to carefully meter your restoration requests. Or, better yet, don't use Glacier in the first place. It's simply not suited for the everyday user. Play with the numbers for yourself: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html And I'm certainly not the first to warn of this: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412886 - http://www.wired.com/2012/08/glacier/ http://www.wired.com/2012/08/glacier/

tlrobinson 12y ago
"It's simply not suited for the everyday user." True, but it seems like a reasonable secondary/off-site backup. If my machines and primary backups are both destroyed or stolen I'll pay whatever is necessary for to recover data (within reason)
derekp7 12y ago
This is something that I haven't seen a straight answer on yet (from Amazon). When you make the restore request, you restore a "block" of data (or container, can't remember what they call it). And you have no control over how fast they restore that container -- if they take 4 hours, it is one price, but if they decide to take less than an hour then they bill you more, for something that isn't under your control -- correct? I did see where you can request a partial container restore (range restores, I think they call it), so you can at least have some control over the retrieval rate (you can, for example, every 2 hours request 10% of a container to restore). But that still seems like a lot of areas that can go wrong.
georgeott 12y ago
I was under the impression if you can retrieve the data slowly, the price goes WAY down. http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/ http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/

tlrobinson 12y ago

"It's simply not suited for the everyday user." True, but it seems like a reasonable secondary/off-site backup. If my machines and primary backups are both destroyed or stolen I'll pay whatever is necessary for to recover data (within reason)

derekp7 12y ago

This is something that I haven't seen a straight answer on yet (from Amazon). When you make the restore request, you restore a "block" of data (or container, can't remember what they call it). And you have no control over how fast they restore that container -- if they take 4 hours, it is one price, but if they decide to take less than an hour then they bill you more, for something that isn't under your control -- correct? I did see where you can request a partial container restore (range restores, I think they call it), so you can at least have some control over the retrieval rate (you can, for example, every 2 hours request 10% of a container to restore). But that still seems like a lot of areas that can go wrong.

georgeott 12y ago

I was under the impression if you can retrieve the data slowly, the price goes WAY down. http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/ http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/