Amazon Glacier as a Photo Repository?
Nov 5, 2013 16:41:41 #
Is anybody using Amazon Glacier to archive their photo library? I currently back up all of my computers to a Synology NAS device with two 3TB drives configured in a RAID-1 (mirrored) array. I also have two 1 TB drives attached via a USB-3 dual drive device to the Synology. All of this allows me to backup 3 Macs and 1 Windows-7 PC as well as hold an archive of approximately 500GBs of digital photos and digital scans of old slides and pictures.
I feel confident that I can recover from any single device failure, including a failure of the Synology. But if a catastrophic crisis should occur such as fire or other disaster, I would be in trouble. One option obviously would be to make a backup of the backups, or at least the critical information, and put it some place off site. However, I know me and I know that will work, once.
So, I have been looking at mechanized solutions including following a number of recent conversations here which referenced Carbonite, Crashplan, MyPCBackup, and a bunch more. Most of these promise unlimited storage for a flat price, but once you get to the details (where the devil always lives), they are for one computer, or seem to throttle access after a certain amount of data has been uploaded, or require a business account for the type of configuration I have.
In the process of looking I stumbled across Amazon S3 which is a web based storage depot that apparently many businesses use as an alternate hosting site. However, it also provides an archival storage service for data that is not meant to be accessed on a daily basis. The archival service is Amazon Glacier. There is more information here: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/
The bottom line for me is that storage costs are $.01/GB/month. That is not a typo. My 500 GB will cost $5.00/month to store. I can freely add to the storage as I wish, and will be billed monthly for whatever usage I incur. Another advantage for me is that my Synology has software to schedule the backups on a daily basis. There are some costs involved to get it out all at once, if necessary, which it appears would be about $120.00, but I would only incur that charge if the catastrophe occurs. At that time, $120.00 would be cheap insurance.
Is anybody else using this service or are any of you aware of problems with it? There are clearly issues if you want to be interactive with the data you upload, but if your only purpose is to have a backup repository anticipating the worst case, I cant find a problem. Thanks for any input.
I feel confident that I can recover from any single device failure, including a failure of the Synology. But if a catastrophic crisis should occur such as fire or other disaster, I would be in trouble. One option obviously would be to make a backup of the backups, or at least the critical information, and put it some place off site. However, I know me and I know that will work, once.
So, I have been looking at mechanized solutions including following a number of recent conversations here which referenced Carbonite, Crashplan, MyPCBackup, and a bunch more. Most of these promise unlimited storage for a flat price, but once you get to the details (where the devil always lives), they are for one computer, or seem to throttle access after a certain amount of data has been uploaded, or require a business account for the type of configuration I have.
In the process of looking I stumbled across Amazon S3 which is a web based storage depot that apparently many businesses use as an alternate hosting site. However, it also provides an archival storage service for data that is not meant to be accessed on a daily basis. The archival service is Amazon Glacier. There is more information here: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/
The bottom line for me is that storage costs are $.01/GB/month. That is not a typo. My 500 GB will cost $5.00/month to store. I can freely add to the storage as I wish, and will be billed monthly for whatever usage I incur. Another advantage for me is that my Synology has software to schedule the backups on a daily basis. There are some costs involved to get it out all at once, if necessary, which it appears would be about $120.00, but I would only incur that charge if the catastrophe occurs. At that time, $120.00 would be cheap insurance.
Is anybody else using this service or are any of you aware of problems with it? There are clearly issues if you want to be interactive with the data you upload, but if your only purpose is to have a backup repository anticipating the worst case, I cant find a problem. Thanks for any input.
Nov 5, 2013 17:19:08 #
I use AWS as cold back up storage. I dont have any issues with it. Its somewhat more user friendly now than it used to be. The price is nice too.
Nov 6, 2013 07:39:52 #
I use AWS as cold back up storage. I dont have any issues with it. Its somewhat more user friendly now than it used to be. The price is nice too.
Thanks for replying. Have you ever tried restoring any files? If so, did it work correctly?
Thanks for replying. Have you ever tried restoring any files? If so, did it work correctly?
Nov 6, 2013 08:18:27 #
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