Is Amazon Glacier cost effective for online backups?

[edwardcoast]

I’ve been exploring all the services offered by AWS (Amazon Web Services) and they offer Amazon Glacier which is a low-cost backup. $0.004 per GB a month. Anyone using this for daily backups? What have your costs actually run and for how much storage?

Have you done a recovery? How were your experiences?

I’m looking at them to do remote backups of a local office Linux server for about 150 GB of data to do daily backups.

[G-SE]

Glacier is very good and extremely cost effective for online backups, as long as you don’t need immediate access to do a recovery. To actually pull the backup, you’ll need to do a restore request before you can access it, which can take time.

One thing to look into would be s3 lifecycle policy which would allow you to put more recent daily backups in regular s3, and as they age, they get moved automatically to glacier.

[engineer_comp_geek]

Moderator Action

Since this is looking for personal experiences, let’s move it to IMHO (from GQ).

[edwardcoast]

@G-SE

Glacier is very good and extremely cost effective for online backups, as long as you don’t need immediate access to do a recovery. To actually pull the backup, you’ll need to do a restore request before you can access it, which can take time.

One thing to look into would be s3 lifecycle policy which would allow you to put more recent daily backups in regular s3, and as they age, they get moved automatically to glacier.

Thanks for the post.

What would be the benefit of doing that? Are you talking about doing snapshot backups?

[G-SE]

@edwardcoast

Thanks for the post.

What would be the benefit of doing that? Are you talking about doing snapshot backups?

Yes, that would be for if you were doing daily snapshot backups and needed to retain them over time. The lifecycle rules allow you to balance the storage availability & cost based on the age of the backup.

If you are just keeping one backup, replacing it every day, glacier would work too (again though, keep in mind the availability issue). If the backup would need to be accessed immediately (in case of a failure or something), standard s3 storage would probably be a better alternative - more expensive, but still pretty cheap.

[edwardcoast]

@G-SE

Yes, that would be for if you were doing daily snapshot backups and needed to retain them over time. The lifecycle rules allow you to balance the storage availability & cost based on the age of the backup.

If you are just keeping one backup, replacing it every day, glacier would work too (again though, keep in mind the availability issue). If the backup would need to be accessed immediately (in case of a failure or something), standard s3 storage would probably be a better alternative - more expensive, but still pretty cheap.

If an urgent complete restore needed to be done, would it make sense to transfer it from Glacier to S3, and then download it to restore?

Do you backup TAR files or does their software provided a sort of rsync capability? Cause it seems it would take a very long time to back up the entire, say, 100 GB file server each night.