Sergey

Happy Sunday everyone!

I spend way too much on my cloud backup. I use 3 different cloud storage providers (don't ask ) and a couple of "free" services.

I also have Amazon Prime which allows to upload any number of full size images for free(i.e. included with subscription) which I don't use because it's very awkward to download images back (you have to select individual images, i.e. no bulk restore/download).

Amazon also has S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage that is pretty cheap to store. I'd use it only for disaster recovery so I don't care that it may take more than 12 hours to access. Restoring though is a total different story and seems may cost a lot of money (they charge for data transfer per GB and possibly some other charges). I didn't find any options like sending your hard drive and getting all images back on that drive. Download pricing is a bit complicated so I'm not exactly sure how much it would cost.

I also can't think of a good strategy how to organize such backup so it's easy to restore either as a whole or parts.

We have multiple computers in the household, and I'd like to store not only images but also videos and different types of documents (word, excel, pdf, etc.) but the images would definitely take the most space.

Does anyone here use S3 Glacier Deep Archive for their long term backups and did you figure out recovery pricing, and what the best organization structure for such backup?

I do have backups on external drives and on Synology NAS running in RAID-1 (mirroring), so the cloud back would be for having a backup off-site.

I am mostly interested to hear opinions on S3 Glacier Deep Archive.

Thanks,
Sergey

BArthur3

You piqued my interest, so I took a look at the offering. Without a really deep dive, it looks to be primarily an enterprise/business/commercial/institutional offering (eg, references use by "start-ups"). And it is built around AWS (Amazon Web Services) which is their commercial offering. So I don't immediately see it as a viable individual back-up methodology. (As a side note, AWS is where Amazon makes the vast majority -- almost all -- their profits.)

yssirk123 Loc: New Jersey

I think the Amazon solution is massive overkill for a hobbyist. My suggestion would be to check out Backblaze.

NCMtnMan Loc: N. Fork New River, Ashe Co., NC

Go check out iDrive cloud backup. They have numerous options for use and is very reasonable.

phot0n0ob

+1 on Backblaze. Their "personal backup" does continuous backups of all internal and external drives attached to your computer. Their "b2 cloud storage" is an Amazon S3 compatible storage option, which - according to them - is significantly cheaper than S3.

Bayou

cwp3420

skibumpkin Loc: Lakes Region, Maine

I have been using Amazon Glacier as a disaster recovery cloud backup service for over 10 years. I only learned about it when I installed my first Synology NAS a number of years ago. Synology has an Amazon Glacier app that comes with the system. After setting up my Glacier account using the same credentials I use for my other Amazon services, I set the backup to run every morning at 00:05. It has been working flawlessly ever since, including when I migrated from my first Synology to a much more robust second one.

I initially worried about the cost to restore data, but since I truly consider this to be a disaster recovery vehicle, I decided that if I needed to use it, the recovery cost would be the least of my problems. I did calculate at the time that a 1 TB download would have been in the order of $100. The pricing seems to change constantly, generally for the better, so that has probably changed as well.

Monthly billing is transaction and storage quantity based. If I upload a lot of data during the month, my bill increases slightly. Currently, I am using close to a TB of storage which is billed at $.0036 per GB. This is down from close to $.009 per GB when I started. My monthly billing currently is between $3.50 and $4.50. I look at it as very inexpensive insurance and don’t spend a lot of time analyzing the variables.

I organize the data based on storage on my NAS. Between my wife and myself, we have 3 Macs and 2 Windows computers. These are all backed up to the NAS. In addition, after processing, I store my photos on the NAS. Each of us has a personal shared NAS folder where we keep data items that are important to us. The NAS folders are mapped to the computers at logon.

The Synology Glacier backup checks our personal folders, my photos folders, and a few other folders containing data items I consider important on a daily basis. New data is uploaded to the Glacier servers. The app also is capable of looking in to the Glacier storage files down to a file level to verify that specific files are present.

To date, I have been very pleased with the service. Of course, I haven’t had a need to do a full disaster rostoral and hope that continues to be the case.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

As you likely know, there are 3 tiers to Amazon S3 - frequent access, infrequent access (which I use), and Glacier (the cheapest). One feature of S3 is that you can move files, folders, or the entire file system between tiers in real time, so what about the possibility of moving the entire file system into infrequent (or frequent) access in the event of a disaster and downloading from there? I don’t know the rules on that, but worth investigating. To my knowledge, Amazon does not provide a loaner HD for restores, but I haven’t asked. One possibility is that in that unlikely event, you may be able to temporarily boost your download speed (maybe to Gbit if available) for a month to do the restore. One thing for sure, there is no more reliable and robust cloud storage tha S3. It’s not accidental that Amazon owns as much of the cloud market as the next 4 providers put together. There are cheaper services, but they don’t have the geographic diversity of Amazon, don’t keep as many copies of your data, and don’t have a primary server close to you to minimize latency - you get what you pay for. I speant 25 years of my IT career specializing in data storage for the biggest companies in the business, and I chose Amazon S3 for my cloud DR. And remember, this is a last very rare event that occurs only after both your primary and local backup fails.

Sergey

Thank you. This is similar to my situation. We have 2 Macs and 1 Windows machines. I will try to play with different options to see what works the best. It might be worth it to try a partial disaster recovery to see how well it works. A lot to think about.

Sergey

Thank you for your reply. It's good to learn from experts in data storage. I don't think I can afford S3 frequent or infrequent access so I probably should go with Glacier or even Glacier Deep Archive option - at least until I eliminate all duplicates and throw aways that I have. That should cut the volume of data at least in half but probably more like 3-4 times. Of course this is a very lengthy process especially that I really can dedicate not more than a couple of hours a week.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Deduplication can certainly reduce storage size - sometimes dramatically. Perhaps dedupe SW could make your task easier?