Saturday 25 August 2012

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.
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5 comments:

  1. Paul25 August 2012 at 23:34

    That last paragraph should it read 1tb rather than 1gb?

    Not come across this service so it's interesting. Even amateur photographers are shooting in RAW these days, so this type of service (fast write, slow retrieval) sounds good.

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    Replies
    1. Unknown26 August 2012 at 08:43

      Doh! You're right of course. Thanks fr letting me know.

      Delete
  2. Andrew Clifford3 September 2012 at 21:09

    Hi Jules,

    I read about this a couple of weeks back, having just created some automated backups on S3. Wondered why it takes Amazon a few hours to get Glacier backups back. Are they really in hard-to-access offline storage, are they covering themselves just-in-case, or do they not want to Glacier to compete with S3? After all, for most business backups 15 mins would be OK, but four hours is too long.

    Andrew

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    Replies
    1. Unknown12 February 2013 at 11:36

      Hard to say whether it's 4 hours because it genuinely is on off-line backup and would need to be restored or whether it's a merely a product differentiator. I guess as a replacement for off-site business backups it's probably still acceptable.

      Delete
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