Amazon Glacier - Game Changer

The problem with cheaply, reliably storing terabytes of data over the long-term is one which not only affects businesses but also individuals who generate large amounts of data. With high-definition camcorders and high-megapixel cameras it's easy for even amateur photographers who take snapshots of their kids growing-up to generate terabytes of photos.

If you want to do offsite backups of priceless, irreplaceable family photos then there's really only been three options until now; some kind of rotating backup strategy using removable media (high-manual effort), syncing data to a friend or relative's house over the Internet (technically-difficult) or using a cloud-based file system such as Amazon S3 or Windows Azure storage (too expensive).

A cloud-based strategy has (theoretically) always been my preferred option. However, it's probably too expensive for the average person. For example, at $0.125 per Gb per month it would cost $128 per month to store 1Tb of data. Ouch.

Enter Amazon Glacier. Amazon Glacier trades accessibility for cost. To retrieve an object from Glacier can take several hours using a scheduled job. However, the cost per Gb per month is a mere $0.01. Wow. This means that it would cost a mere $10.24 per month to store 1Tb of data. A greater than 90% reduction in cost over S3. Suddenly redundant cloud-based archival of those irreplaceable family photos and videos is affordable for most people.